“After 30 years, I am returning as a witness, to help identify the people who are buried there. Hopefully this way, they will stop tormenting me in my dreams.” –Dolores Guzmán
The clothes and belongings of the dead are laid out on tables, carefully folded and arranged: Sneakers whose leather is partly eaten away; pairs of earrings in little evidence bags; hoodies, undergarments, jackets, and shirts, their prints still vivid. An elderly woman walks between the rows, wiping away tears. She stops in front of a belt whose buckle is a large letter C. “That’s my cousin Sebastián. Here’s his belt,” the woman says. “His mother is still alive and keeps a photo of him.”
The items come from a mass grave, the belongings of victims killed in a 1984 massacre. The bodies have been carefully exhumed and their bones collected. Now, all that remains is to identify them, so they can be returned to their families and properly buried.
In THE SEARCH (LA BUSQUEDA), we follow three people as they deal with the legacy and personal damage of the civil war that ravaged Peru for 20 years. In 1980, the Shining Path movement launched an armed struggle aimed at overthrowing the Peruvian government and instituting a Communist regime. By the time the civil war ended, in 2000, nearly 70,000 Peruvians had been killed. Government and guerrilla forces were both guilty of horrendous human rights abuses.
Dolores Guzmán is the survivor of a military massacre of civilians in her remote Andean village. She returns to the village for the first time in 32 years, to help identify the bodies of her relatives. Lurgio Gavilán is a former child soldier pressed into battle for both sides. As a pre-teen he set off to find his brother, who was with the Shining Path. After joining the rebels (and remaining after his brother was killed), he was captured by the military and forced into a counterinsurgency unit at age 14. And José Carlos Agüero, is a writer and the son of Shining Path militants killed extra-judicially by a government death squad. Through his work, he tries to reconcile his revolutionary upbringing with his parents’ ideals, the injustice of their deaths, and the violence they perpetrated.
Powerful, emotional, and beautifully filmed, THE SEARCH (LA BUSQUEDA) captures the ongoing trauma of war—even decades later—for participants, bystanders, and children. The Shining Path uprising polarized Peru, but THE SEARCH (LA BUSQUEDA) does not seek to lay blame. It is a film about truth, reconciliation, and some attempt at closure.
“Beautifully shot, with breathtaking landscapes; a haunting, honest, and unblinking exploration. 'The Search' (La Búsqueda) teaches us that learning to listen is neither to forget the past nor to take it at face value, but to build upon it. This film is highly recommended for use in the classroom. In seeing and listening to people who actually lived through the conflict, my students grappled more deeply with the nature of suffering and better understood the process of reconciliation in a postwar society. A welcome addition to any syllabus focusing on the Latin American experience during the twentieth century.” —Ulices Piña, California State University in the journal H-LatAm
“'The Search' (La Búsqueda) offers the opportunity to rethink a violent era, whose wounds have not yet healed. Without choosing sides, it thoughtfully examines an issue that continues to generate debate in Peruvian society.” —Infocine
“Impressive.” —Diario16
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Film Festival 2020
Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival 2019
Asecan Andalusian Cinema Awards 2019
Santiago del Estero International Film Festival 2019
Alcances Documentary Film Festival 2019
Prix du Public, Biarritz Latin American Festival 2019
Festival de Cine Iberoamericano 2019
Grand Prize, Documenta 2019 French Andean Documentary Films Contest
Lima Film Festival 2018
Seville European Film Festival 2018
Habana International Film Festival of New Latin American Cinema 2018