‘The Song of the Butterflies’ director Núria Frigola Torrent on her new documentary

'The song of the butterflies' - directed by Nuria Frigola Torrent

Born in the Catalonia region of Spain, Nuria Frigola Torrent He has a degree in Audiovisual Communication and a Master in Human Development. After several years working at Amnesty International, he turned to film and in 2015 he produced the documentary 'Daughter Of The Lake' and directed a short film called 'Cebiche & pa amb tomata'. Her first feature film as a director 'The song of the butterflies'played festivals around the world, including the Guadalajara International Film Festival, Hot Docs, the Havana Film Festival, and the Seattle International Film Festival.

'The Song of the Butterflies' follows Rember Yahuarcani, an indigenous artist in Peru, as he traces his roots within the Uitoto nation. The film follows Rember from his home in Lima, where he works as an artist and activist in the Amazon community of Pebas to visit his father, a painter, and his mother, a sculptor. While the documentary addresses aspects of the rubber boom and the atrocities it inflicted on the ingedinous people, it does not focus on the settlers. Rather, it puts Rember's work and his connection to his people front and center.

'The song of the butterflies' is free streaming on pov.org until October 29, 2021

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Núria Frigola Torrent told us about making the film.

Moviefone: How did you get involved in this project?

Nuria Frigola Torrent: I have always had this obsession with identity, roots and origins. I am an immigrant I am from a small town in the Catalonia region of Spain, and I emigrated to Peru. So this has interested me in all my works. In 2014, I was wrapping up production on my first feature film as a producer, 'Daughter of the Lake.' It is a story about environmental conflicts. The director of that movie, Ernesto Cabellos, who has been a mentor to me, really pushed me to make my first movie. While I was working with him all those years on the documentary, I made a short film. It encouraged me a lot. I was interested in identities, but when I started the project, I didn't have the story. I only knew that I wanted to work on the identity and diversity of the different nations of Peru. I started looking for characters. In documentary, at least in my methodology, it is a kind of casting and telling people that I was looking for people who consider themselves indigenous living in Lima.

That's when I met Rember, but the story of finding him was something of a gift. Everything she was discovering about him and his family was more powerful. I approached him because he was an indigenous person from Lima. He could have had any profession in the world, but he was an artist. That's more interesting than being an accountant. His entire family were artists. Then I found out that her grandmother had to flee the horror of the rubber boom. Then I found out that his father made paintings about it. So everything was getting more and more interesting. And it was interesting that he didn't want to paint about horror, but his father did. It was a gift that he was given the power to tell this story with Rember based on the truth of his family.

MF: Can you talk about Rember Yahuarcani's art and how it reflects the themes of the film?

Torrent: Rember and his family, both his father and mother, are all artists. Being an indigenous artist in Peru is interesting because it doesn't have much to do with being an artist in New York, not even in Lima. They are artists, but also hunters and farmers. They are self-taught. The family began making art, but it was not traditional within their nation. The painting is traditional, but not how it is done. They developed their own style. His works portray a cosmic vision of the nation. He paints the stories his grandmother told him; legends and characters and magical stories of the jungle. He colors and shapes very interesting characters and myths from the Uitoto culture that he received from his grandmother.

MF: How did you get the voiceover of your grandmother Martha?

Torrent: Audio recordings come from different sources. We started working on the film in 2014, and I came across the first images of Martha in 2017. I found some personal images of her family that were used in other work, and I saw this image of Rember being blessed by Martha. When I started working with him, she had already died and asked him to give her message to the world. It was already the mission of the film, but when I saw that footage, I realized that it was literal, her grandmother had asked her. It was then that I started asking for footage from other filmmakers who had worked with their family before, and also from Rember and Santiago who had filmed Grandma Martha themselves. The idea is for Martha to be like the great storyteller of the movie, not only for Rember, but also guiding the audience on this journey.

MF: How was the archival photography research process?

Torrent: There were two sources. Most of them are actually from the slave owners. During the rubber boom, a Peruvian-run company with some British capital was responsible for many of these atrocities. It was known as Casa Arana. There was an Irishman (Roger Casement) who initiated the international denunciation of the abuses in the rubber factories. Human rights, as we see them now, didn't really exist by that name, but he went on a kind of research trip on human rights. Most of the images come from the company itself, which asked a photographer to take photos, thinking that the images showed that they were doing a good job. That they were not enslaving, but teaching the local people. But in reality, the images are so colonial that what they reflect with our eyes today is very shocking. But those were images that the company was trying to use to clean up its image! There is also an image, in the scene with the masks, which was made by Roger Casement himself.

MF: Were there any challenges to shoot in the Amazon?

Torrent: I had all kinds of challenges throughout the process. From creative crises to finding the money. I had all kinds of problems that are frequent in the first movies, but then shooting in the Amazon is fascinating, but also very difficult. One practical thing is that it is very difficult in terms of sound because what happens is that, in the communities where we shoot both in Colombia and Peru, electricity is not there all the time. So from six to eight in the afternoon the power generators are turned on and the sound becomes impossible. Everyone plays music, local churches start sermons. We shot footage on four or five different trips, and the first time I found out that if we were there for ten days, we didn't actually have ten days. During the weekends the light was on and it was impossible to shoot. Then, for example, from noon to 1 in the afternoon there was always music. So the filming times were limited.

MF: Do you think that cinema is an important way to preserve oral histories?

Torrent: For me, my film is a collective memory tool. We have to decide how we use the film. It is very important that I be a foreigner giving my profession, the filmmaker, to a story that does not belong to me. It was very important what kind of story we were giving to the story. It was something that we negotiated with Rember, but also with the La Chorrera community. When we got permission to shoot there, it wasn't a formal thing with the role. It was the wise old men who told me: "Yes, you can shoot with our people." The leader told me that they didn't want to put the rubber boom disaster on the front lines. They are very poetic, as you can see from Martha's words, that's why she told me: “We have already buried the grain of sadness. Now we want to fulfill the bean of abundance ”. So, somehow in Colombia they had lived through the disaster of the rubber boom 100 years ago, but then they have had other lives. They don't want to look at the past in pain all the time. They want to move on. Rember's father is very fond of transferring history through art, even to his grandchildren, but Rember says, "I don't want to paint, and I can't paint, sad things." I think as a foreigner I really wanted to talk about the story of that injustice, but I wanted more than that to respect the point of view of the community I was telling the story to. It is that this happened, but they are not only that. They are living. They are creators. In a way, this story is how they are still alive and that is the main message.

MF: What do you hope people learn from watching this documentary?

Torrent: It is an invitation to think about your own origin. I hope this works for someone who can see the movie where it was shot, an unworthy person in Arizona, or someone who is from Los Angeles but not of unworthy origin. Is it that you think of yourself and where you come from, or you ask your parents, what do you know about our grandparents? Also, maybe people go to Google and search for the rubber boom and wonder what happened. Mainly, it is an invitation to connect with who we are in the world. Where we come from?

MF: Do you have another film directed by a woman that you would recommend to readers?

Torrent: I was definitely inspired by women. I am glad that there is now a great movement to support women filmmakers and creators in general. It is very inspiring for me to see colleagues in Peru and Latin America making films and making them our own way. Like Melina León, who is a fiction filmmaker from Peru. One day I was interviewing her and she told me about seeing images of male filmmakers and feeling like they didn't identify her as a director because it was such a masculine way of directing and she couldn't see herself there. Maybe that's why many of us don't think we were good directors, because that's not how we work. He said he had to find his own way. When I heard that I felt so identified because I learned to make a film as a woman, being myself and not like anyone else, and trusting that my way, which was perhaps softer on the subject and the way of approaching people, it was correct. . Not that he didn't have leadership or something. I think it is important to find your own way. Another mentor, Heddy Honigmann, who is a Dutch-Pereuvian filmmaker who has been my teacher in the workshops and whose films are really aspiring.

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'Song without a name' - directed by Melina León

Pamela Mendoza in 'Song without a name'

Peruvian director Melina Leon received an MFA from Columbia University. His short film 'El Paraíso de Lili (Lili's Paradise)' was screened at the 47th New York Film Festival. His first feature film 'Song without a Name'premiered at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight in 2019, where it was nominated for the Golden Chamber. It became the Peruvian entry for Best International Film, although it was not nominated. Set in 1988, it was inspired by an incident of human trafficking first reported by his father Ismael León.

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'Mad' - Directed by Heddy Honigmann

Born in Lima, Peru to Polish Jewish immigrants, Heddy Honigmann then he emigrated to the Netherlands. He has directed more than 20 short and feature films, ranging between fiction and documentary cinema. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich and the Pompidou Center in Paris have held retrospectives of his films. His 1999 documentary 'Mad'on the traumatic effects of war on soldiers in United Nations peacekeeping missions received multiple international awards.