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Event
LA TRINCHERA LUMINOSA DEL PRESIDENTE GONZALO - 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival Closing Night Film
La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo
Jim Finn
Feature 60:00 Video 2007
The Chicago Underground Film Festival is very excited to present the Chicago Premiere of "La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo" the second feature by Jim Finn following his internationally acclaimed debut "Interkosmos"
When members of the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group the Shining Path were captured and imprisoned, the authorities kept them in their own cellblocks, which they ran as guerrilla training camps. The Shining Path prisoners called their cellblocks "shining trenches of combat." The prisoners organized propaganda, literature, and military classes as well as marches, criticism sessions, and dances. Outside the prison walls their cult-like leader Chairman Gonzalo, the nom-de-guerre of former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman, used to read the guerrillas excerpts not only of Mao and Stalin but also Shakespeare so they would understand how conspiracies are formed and how power works. The Shining Path was known to recruit heavily among highland Indians and women. It had the highest proportion of women commanders in Latin American guerrilla history. One of the key roles for women, for example, was to perform the coup-de-grace on a wounded victim. The extreme violence and ideological dogmatism of the Shining Path was seen at the time as an aberration among Latin American guerrilla groups, but now it seems that they were more in line with 21st-century guerrilla tactics. Though set in the late 80s, a movie about terrorist extremists locked away and forgotten in prison with nothing but their ideology has a relevance that doesn't seem to be fading any time soon.
Jim Becker and Colleen Burke created the music for the film. Besides writing and touring with his band Califone, Jim Becker most recently has toured with the bands Freakwater and the Dirty Three. As well as playing piano in the band We Ragazzi, Colleen Burke has toured with Smog. They collaborated on the soundtrack for Interkosmos in 2006.
"La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo" was shot in Hi-8 analog as if it were an amateur video made perhaps by the prisoners themselves in the late 80s. The location for the film was the New Mexico State Fairgrounds' 4H Youth Dormitory in the middle of Albuquerque. We painted it with Maoist murals and cast actors in New Mexico who could speak Spanish or Navajo (Dine). Navajo is used because so much of the recruitment for the Shining Path was done in among the Quechua, Ayamara and other Indian groups. Though the film is heavily researched and even uses sections of interviews and poems from guerrillas, it is a fictional film. In this fictionalized Shining Path world, Navajo is spoken in prison. The Navajo actors translated scenes from Macbeth into tape recorders and played it back to better the translation and memorize the dialogue. They helped create the performance as well as the sets for the Revolutionary Theater piece within the f
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LocationChopin Theater
1543 W. Division
Chicago, IL 60622
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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