Currently screening in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles and the Laemmle Theatre in Glendale is a The Condor Daughter, written and directed by Bolivian filmmaker Álvaro Olmos Torrico. This beautiful yet realistic film takes place in Totorani, a small village high in the Bolivian Andes and is a study of two women – Clara, a bright, capable young women with a gift of singing, and her adoptive mother, Ana, who has carefully taught her the old midwife Quechua traditions. The Condor Daughter is Bolivia’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.”
Director OImos Torrrico has traveled widely in his native Bolivia and, during one of his travels, he met a Quechua midwife, the last of her kind in a community that is steadily dwindling. He repeatedly visited her and eventually managed to communicate with her, despite not speaking Quechua himself. Her death inspired his second feature film The Condor Daughter.|
Ana (María Magdalena Sanizo), the elderly midwife, is the film’s heart; she is a repository of ancient knowledge. She embodies a shared heritage and, for many in the small Quechua community, the first person they encounter in life. She represents a heritage that is vanishing in a world being pressured by modernity and opening up by outside forces. Clara (Marisol Vallejos Montaño) is her apprentice and accompanied Ana to assist with women giving birth in a remote Andean villages. She assists Ana with these women in labor singing gentle Quechua songs meant to guide babies safely into the world.
Clara is the person we most readily associate with the The Condor Daughter of the film’s title – especially since she is soon to spread her wings and explore a new world of music in the nearby city of Cochabamba. Her first taste of modern music and new songs comes via a small transistor radio, a gift of gratitude presented to her by one of the young fathers after a delivery. An early scene foreshadows the ensuing conflict between modernity and tradition, between generations and worldviews: Clara spots a large bird in the sky and believes it to be a condor, whereas Ana) insists it is merely a vulture.
Olmos Torrico’s screenplay and filming process were informed by meticulous research and a deep understanding of the traditions – and, above all, the social dynamics – within these small, once largely self-sufficient communities.
Unlike the romanticized rural films of the European tradition, La Hija Cóndor does not pit the corrupt modernity of the city against a pastoral idyll. Torrico reveals the dynamics of a Quechua community in the Bolivian Andes, with ethnographic precision and a clear view of the changes in traditional societies.
When doctors from the city do appear, seeking to replace the tradition of midwifery with modern medical care and – as part of government programs – even distributing subsidies and stipends to reward women for giving birth in clinics. However, Torrico shows us the insularity and occasional narrow-mindedness of the small mountain community. We witness a draconian punishment inflicted on a young woman who dared to flirt “inappropriately” with a man.
For Clara’s friend Flora (Alisson Jimenez), the scene in which the village leader hacks off the young woman’s long hair – amidst the cheering of the “compañeros* and *compañeras* – is the final straw that drives her to leave the community for the city. Clara follows her – albeit torn inside – after Ana smashes her beloved radio.
At this point of Clara’s departure, the film’s perspective shifts from her to the elderly Ana. Villagers come to Ana to lament the misfortunes that have befallen the community – dead livestock, drought, poor harvests – which they attribute to Clara’s leaving, stating that she has been struck by lightning. At the behest of the villagers, Ana finally resolves to bring Clara back and travels to the city to find her. In her eyes, it is Clara’s abandonment of her calling that constitutes a transgression, angering Pachamama, the Earth Mother.
Ana’s trip to the city allows us to experience a new world through the eyes of the elderly midwife – much as the earlier glimpse into the mountain community was conveyed through Clara’s perspective. Her search for Clara in the big city seems to yield no clues under she happens upon Beatriz (Nely Huayta) who had left a mountain village years before and knows people in the local music scene. Among other things, Ana is astonished to discover in the city that Clara has by no means abandoned her calling. Instead, she is transformed her singing and music in ways that are entirely new and unfamiliar to her. She does not recognize this “new” Clara performing in a city nightclub.
One might see parallels in Clara’s experience to the main character in Georgi M. Unkovksi’s DJ Ahmed. While Unkovski maximizes and merges the contrasts between traditional rural life and the worlds of social media and techno with a playful, tongue-in-cheek touch, Torrico seeks a reconciliation of these developments – a way to guide his “Condor Daughter” back to the Andean heavens without simply dragging her through the abyss of modernity.
“I came to understand the vital role traditional midwives play in the birth cycles of rural communities. Their presence is essential to passing down traditional and cultural Indigenous values, even those that may seem contradictory or timeless to us,” Olmos Torrico said at the Q&A after the screening. His 2019 debut feature Wiñay marked one of the first Bolivian films to see a global release on Amazon Prime, is behind as a producer several buzz titles that include Martín Boulocq’s 2022 Tribeca player The Visitor and Yashira Jordan’s gutsy debut fiction feature Diamond (Diamante). Nely Huayta, Alisson Jimenez and Gregoria Maldonado star alongside Sanizo and Vallejo Montaño, a self-taught musician whose folk band Estrella del Valle has over 2.9 million TikTok followers. The film, six years in the making, relied on a dedicated crew of professionals from Bolivia, Uruguay and Peru.
