My first interest in cinema stemmed from its ability to express what cannot be adequately conveyed with words, like when you try to describe a dream upon waking. As a child, I had difficulties developing speech in a conventional way and that inability to communicate verbally evolved into a deep connection with the possibilities of cinematic language.
However, my first two films, REMINISCENCES (2010) and VIDEOPHILIA (2015), were shaped by financial limitations, which inspired me to explore alternative approaches to production and editing. Through avant-garde and experimental cinema, I discovered tools that allowed me to overcome both economic and communicative barriers.
PUNKU marks the first time that budgetary constraints took a back seat, allowing me to focus on creating not only the film that I could make, but the one I really wanted to do and the one I felt I had to make. This involved not only capturing my personal experiences, but also representing a type of place that I often see stereotyped and simplified in cinema.
My goal was to show a space from an internal perspective while, at the same time, immersing myself in the diverse inner worlds of its inhabitants. In the research process we did approximately 500 interviews with teenagers to compensate for the focus on my own experiences and those of my older relatives.
It was important to work with a team composed mostly of people from the same region, and having these people represent themselves. Their faces, their accents, their own testimonies when improvising dialogues, making the characters adapt to the person, and not the other way around.
In these conversations they shared their interests, their dreams, and their nightmares, all of which greatly strengthened the process of re-writing the script while already settled in the city where the film was shot, Quillabamba, where I lived full-time from 2019 to 2023. This period of time was very rich for questioning my own preconceived ideas, and knowing how to open up to the unexpected.
For this same reason it was important to work not only with a technical team composed mostly of people from the same region where we would film, but also that the people of the same place have the opportunity to represent themselves. Their faces, their accents, their own testimonies when improvising dialogues on my subtle indications, making the characters adapt to the person, and not the other way around, as is usually done.
Taking the time to know your actors and giving yourself the pleasure of making your neighbours, friends, and family act. Allowing your crew to act and your cast to also be part of the production. Inventing fictions to portray your personal spaces where you grew up, where you learned to swim, where you buried your dead. All these forms, somewhat removed from the more industrial methods, have been pillars of what really makes it worthwhile to dedicate so many years to making a film that shows the unspoken and talks about the unseen.
But I wonder, where do these images live? Do they inhabit the same space as dreams, memories, myths, lies, and the dead?
Being a Peruvian filmmaker, I have grown up with few local cinematographic references that do justice to our realities. This feeling of lack is even greater if you are, like me, from such an isolated place that you have to carry the weight of years of invisibility. Perhaps that is how I desperately entered cinephilia, needing to find some mirror in which to feel reflected. But I wonder, where do these images live? Do they inhabit the same space as dreams, memories, myths, lies, and the dead? Without knowing the answer, I decided that in PUNKU, I could put cinema into dialogue with other worlds, a place like Quillabamba with the history of cinema, and my own subjectivity with the collective.
The coexistence of multiple realities is a recurring theme in my films. Through various styles and formats – including stop motion animation, TikTok reels, and hand-processed film – I aim to create tension and shift hierarchies between different layers of reality. By exploring the infinite potential of montage, the different kinds of leaps between formats, point of views, shots, or even between individual frames, I sought to create a unique aesthetic and conceptual experience where the cut is a magical force of creation and transmutation.
PUNKU, which means ‘gateway’ in Quechua, transcends specific cinematic traditions. Instead, it delves into the possibilities of cinema as a vehicle for understanding the human experience and its mysteries. The film is comprised of twenty-one ‘inner gateways’ that form a personal, syncretic mythology, representing also how a gap can link two moments, two people, or two worlds. P V N K V, as I like to write the title, is the feedback loop between the observer and the observed.
J.D. Fernández Molero
