Christine Janney

Nora de Izcue turned to filmmaking to support herself and her four children after escaping a troubled marriage in the 1960s. She ended up becoming a social justice documentarian at a time of repression and revolution, forging the way as Peru’s first woman film director and changing the future of Latin American cinema through the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema and the International School of Film and Television in Cuba. Her third film, the documentary Runan Caycu (We Are People), depicted the fight for social justice by Quechua-speaking Indigenous farmers in the 1970s. But because it shed light on past repression of Indigenous peoples by the Peruvian military, the film was banned by the dictatorship in power at the time. Nora smuggled the film out of Peru, and hid copies where she could, but the original reels have gone missing. This is the story of the search for Nora — the search for her original reels that might be hidden in vulnerable archives in Peru, Venezuela, and Cuba. It is the search for Nora’s impact on Peruvian and Latin American cinema. It is the story of Nora’s own search for herself, and for the life that she wanted to live.