Cimarrones

“This powerful, short fiction film recreates events that took place in Peru in the early 1800s, when a group of cimarrones—runaway slaves—attacked a caravan to free friends who’d been sentenced to death. Several of Peru’s vanguard artists of the early 1980s participated in the making of this film. The Afro-Peruvian leader is played by Amador Ballumbrosio, the elder patriarch of the legendary Ballumbrosio family, and the script was co-written by Enrique Verástegui, the iconic Peruvian poet (of African and Chinese descent) who founded the Movimiento Hora Cero. The film’s music was composed by Carlos Hayre, the great Peruvian musicologist who introduced the use of the cajón (box drum) in creole waltzes and Andean harmonies in modern jazz and bossa nova arrangements.