Join Global Arts and Cultures for a screening of Liminal by Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe.

The history of Peru’s armed conflict is a continuous narrative of traumatic violence that resulted in the murder and disappearance of thousands of mostly Indigenous people in the late 20th century, primarily in the country’s highland regions of Ayacucho and Huánuco. In January 2002, the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF), in partnership with Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), began exhuming some of the mass graves created during the unrest. Liminal, a looping hour-long film, poignantly captures part of this exhumation process through cinematic approaches that resist our compulsive desire to categorize and quantify the most horrific and extreme of human experiences to understand them in more tangible terms. Instead, we are haunted, forced to ceaselessly remember the unnamed/nameless victims of this and other genocides.

Liminal was produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation and supported by Mondriaan Fonds. It has since been screened at various locations worldwide, including MALI - Museo de Arte de Lima, MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

A virtual Q&A with filmmaker Maya Watanabe, a Ph.D. researcher at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London will follow the screening.