Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Corazón Aymara

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Directed by
  
Pedro Sambarino

Distributed by
  
Boliviana

Country
  
Bolivia

Initial release
  
1925

Written by
  
Ángel Salas

Release date
  
1925

Language
  
silent

Director
  
Pedro Sambarino

Similar
  
Wara Wara, The Blood of the Condor, The Night of San Juan, Ukamau, Los Hermanos Cartagena

Flor primaveral calle canpero coraz n aymara


Corazón Aymara (Aymara Heart) is a 1925 lost Bolivian silent feature film, directed by Pedro Sambarino.

Contents

Production background

This film is generally described as Bolivia's first ever fiction feature film. It portrays an Aymara woman struggling against accusations that she is unfaithful to her husband.

Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes, places Corazón Aymara in the context of the Bolivian state's "indigenist project" of the 1920s and 1930s. Corazón Aymara, like José Maria Velasco Maidana's Wara Wara (1930), served as a "visual register of the modernization of the nation state" - thus, according to José Antonio Lucero of the University of Washington, "narrating a future of synthetic mestizo nation building". Lucero also notes that indigenous characters in the cinema of the time were orientalised and played by non-indigenous actors and actresses.

By contrast, historian Carlos Mesa, who founded Cinemateca Boliviana in 1976 and was its director until 1985, then served as President of Bolivia from 2003 to 2005, describes Corazón Aymara and Wara Wara as part of an "avant-garde intellectual and artistic movement" which promoted the role of indigenous Bolivians in the 1920s and 1930s.

Preservation status

Corazón Aymara is a lost film, as there are no known copies of it in existence; Wara Wara is "the only known surviving work from Bolivia's silent-film era".

References

Corazón Aymara Wikipedia