By Dimitri
Keramitas
Sigo Siendo - winner of the Best Documentary
award at the Lima Festival de Cine - is a fascinating meditation on music, and
a number of other things.
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| A young singer with charming musicians in Sigo Siendo. |
The movie
focuses on Maximo Damian, “Don Maximo”, an indigenous Peruvian violinist. He
seems to be a lifelong itinerant musician. No spring chicken, Don Maximo
crosses the beautiful but forbidding Peruvian hinterlands - hills, jungle,
parched landscapes - as well as the teeming capital of Lima. The scenery is
beautifully captured by the director and cinematographer, with the vividness of
a travelogue, but an atmospheric, near-mythic quality as well.
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| Hitting the parched road in Sigo Siendo (I'm Still). |
Don Maximo
plays at one festival or celebration or another. Often these are linked to
indigenous rituals, for instance calling upon the waters to replenish the land
(with the help of the canal whose operation is being inaugurated). Water is a
chief symbol in what remains a very agrarian country. One of the polarities we
observe is between the dry countryside and Lima, which is not only an urban
metropolis, but located next to the ocean. Don Maximo recounts how when he saw
the beach for the first time as a youth he wondered where the giant “flood” was
coming from.
There’s a
striking cultural dichotomy depicted between the indigenous world and the more
Westernized Hispanophone society. Aside from the Indians’ link to ritual and
nature, there’s language. Most of the people we see speak a native language,
rather than Spanish (the film’s alternate title is Kachkaniraqmi), and it’s in this language that the music is sung.
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| Landscape plays a big role in the film. |
Yet the
dichotomy is more complicated than we might think. The indigenous world has
adopted Western fabrics and clothing, and the music is played on conventional
instruments as well as traditional ones. We meet one indigenous man who long
ago moved to the capital and became a chemical engineer, seemingly in disguise
in his Western business suit, but also maintaining a parallel life as a
traditional musician.
Some viewers
may also be surprised to see that in addition to the indigenous and Spanish
cultures in Peru, there’s a vibrant Afro-Latin culture. There the music has the percussive stress of
African music, as well as bluesy lyrics (sometimes laced with humour), and
types of dance that resemble clog dancing and tap. Don Maximo has no problem
harmonizing when he takes part in a procession in which dozens of rhythmically
stamping feet are as much percussive music as dance (and also provide a visual
show as they raise clouds of dust on the unpaved road).
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| Making music together in Sigo Siendo. |
One last
dichotomy has to do with age and gender. All the male musicians portrayed are
quite old. Is it because the director chose to focus exclusively on them? Or
does it indicate that the young male generation isn’t interested in traditional
music? This is left unexplored. There are also a number of women singers
depicted, nearly all younger. We understand that the older generation of
indigenous women was constrained by manual work and domestic life, even if they
participated in local celebrations. The young women we see are obviously
talented, but with an emotional streak somewhat at odds with the austere purity
of the traditional indigenous sound.
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| The poster, and a hint of Afro-Peruvian music. |
In general,
Don Maximo seems to travel effortlessly from one world to another, on foot and
for longer distances by bus and minibus. He may wear simple clothing, or put on
an elaborate Amerindian costume for celebrations. As a boy he apparently had a
troubled family life - his father was also a violinist but for some reason
opposed his son’s choice to follow in his footsteps, going so far as to hide
his instrument and to un-tune it. He was clearly closer to his mother.
Don Maximo
has his own family, whom we never see. We don’t know if his wife is still
alive, or where his children are. Beneath the ups and downs of his peripatetic
life, the ambiguities and mysteries, is his ever-present violin. When Don
Maximo muses on mortality he says that if he was to be reborn, his future
incarnation would still have the violin.
Production: Rolando Toledo/Gervasio
Iglesias/Guillermo Toledo. Distribution: New Century Films. Photos courtesy of the distributors.
