Song Without a Name

Song Without a Name begins less like a drama and more like a black-and-white observational documentary, as a pregnant woman goes through the last days before she becomes a mother. Georgina (Mendoza) is Quechuan, one of the indigenous people of Peru, who has moved from the war-torn Andes to the relative safety of Lima. Her days are long, filled with hard toil selling potatoes by the side of the road with her husband. Her hope and dreams are wrapped around the baby she carries, and when the doctors take it away straight after birth she has no recourse. After all, who cares about the wailing of a native woman? The only ear that hear belong to Pedro (Párraga), a cub reporter cutting his teeth reporting on mass graves, unsure whether they were the result of the Maoist guerrillas of the Shining Path or government forces.

Inspired by a real case of state-sanctioned child abduction uncovered by her father, La República reporter Ismael León, writer-director León moves the story from the time of the original reporting to 1988. That shift allows her to feed in both the rise of the ultra-violent Sindero Luminosa terrorist group and the sinister police state that had used their crimes as an excuse to oppress the entire nation. There's an added level of bleakness in that transition, away from the fading glow of the landmark 1980 elections (the first in 17 years) and right into the heart of the grueling slide into carnage, corruption, and economic collapse under President Alan García. Talk of runaway inflation dominates after-dinner conversation, the police run rampant, Georgina is ignored, Pedro threatened, and the idea of seeking justice is like catching mist in a jar.

Unlike Alfonso Cuarón's critically-lauded Roma, which somehow managed to reduce its indigenous protagonist to a passive observer in her own life, Song Without a Name never loses sight of Georgina's pain or her agency - or its limits. She has to go to the newspaper because, as an indigenous woman, she has no redress against abuse by the state. Pedro is her only option (although his early arrest by thuggish police officers show that even he is not immune from the heavy hands of authority). He has plenty to be afraid of, both as a journalist in a far-from-open-state, and a closeted man, as revealed with a flirtation with his neighbor. That seems like a strange digression in a film that otherwise excels in its lean elegance, but it's part of León's broader story. Georgina and Pedro recognize their outsider status in each other, but also how little they can do. The everyday world challenges them, like the long hill that she must traverse every day from her ramshackle little home. Their worlds are caught in silvers and blacks by Inti Briones, constrained by the box-like restrictions of academy format filmstock - a deliberate claustrophobia similar to what Robert Eggers achieved by using Movietone ratio in The Lighthouse. The resolution is no less bleak, either, as the pair discover for the audience that the truth does not always set you free.