Theory and Practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski

The Peruvian cinema collective Grupo Chaski was formed in 1982 by María Barea, Fernando Barreto, Fernando Espinoza, Stefan Kaspar, and Alejandro Legaspi. Growing to over sixty members by the late 1980s, the group joins a long history of collective filmmaking in Latin America. Beginning with the work of the Argentine Fernando Birri who founded the Santa Fe documentary school in the 1950s and who made a number of socially significant documentaries that traced the lives of the lower classes, the Latin American practice of collective filmmaking incorporates two main features: a commitment to making films with and for a marginalized community and a desire to alter mainstream commercial filmmaking practices. Such a concept of the collective, then, meant that these filmmakers wanted to collaborate with the communities they were filming, asking for their input and avoiding as much as possible the imposition of their ideas on the subjects of their films. Similarly, these film collectives wer... more