The Courage of the People (1971)

Interesting facts

The Courage of the People is a 1971 Bolivian docudrama film directed by Jorge Sanjinés and starring Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Eusebio Gironda, Federico Vallejo and Felicidad Coca García. Made with the Grupo Ukamau collective, it reconstructs the massacres of Bolivian mineworkers, centering on the Night of San Juan massacre of 1967 at the Siglo XX mine under the government of René Barrientos. Several of the participants had lived through the events and reenact them on screen, a hallmark of Sanjinés's participatory cinema. It is regarded as a landmark of Bolivian and New Latin American Cinema.

Production and style

The film was made by Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau collective using non-professional performers—many of them actual survivors of the events depicted—reenacting the repression they had endured. This blending of documentary testimony and dramatic reconstruction is characteristic of Sanjinés's work and of the militant Third Cinema movement.

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