Feature 60:00 Video 2007

The Chicago Underground Film Festival is very excited to present the Chicago Premiere of “La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo” the second feature by Jim Finn following his internationally acclaimed debut “Interkosmos”

When members of the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group the Shining Path were captured and imprisoned, the authorities kept them in their own cellblocks, which they ran as guerrilla training camps. The Shining Path prisoners called their cellblocks “shining trenches of combat.” The prisoners organized propaganda, literature, and military classes as well as marches, criticism sessions, and dances. Outside the prison walls their cult-like leader Chairman Gonzalo, the nom-de-guerre of former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman, used to read the guerrillas excerpts not only of Mao and Stalin but also Shakespeare so they would understand how conspiracies are formed and how power works. The Shining Path was known to recruit heavily among highland Indians and women. It had the highest proportion of women commanders in Latin American guerrilla history. One of the key roles for women, for example, was to perform the coup-de-grace on a wounded victim. The extreme violence and ideological dogmatism of the Shining Path was seen at the time as an aberration among Latin American guerrilla groups, but now it seems that they were more in line with 21st-century guerrilla tactics. Though set in the late 80s, a movie about terrorist extremists locked away and forgotten in prison with nothing but their ideology has a relevance that doesn’t seem to be fading any time soon.

Jim Becker and Colleen Burke created the music for the film. Besides writing and touring with his band Califone, Jim Becker most recently has toured with the bands Freakwater and the Dirty Three. As well as playing piano in the band We Ragazzi, Colleen Burke has toured with Smog. They collaborated on the soundtrack for Interkosmos in 2006.

“La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo” was shot in Hi-8 analog as if it were an amateur video made perhaps by the prisoners themselves in the late 80s. The location for the film was the New Mexico State Fairgrounds’ 4H Youth Dormitory in the middle of Albuquerque. We painted it with Maoist murals and cast actors in New Mexico who could speak Spanish or Navajo (Dine). Navajo is used because so much of the recruitment for the Shining Path was done in among the Quechua, Ayamara and other Indian groups. Though the film is heavily researched and even uses sections of interviews and poems from guerrillas, it is a fictional film. In this fictionalized Shining Path world, Navajo is spoken in prison. The Navajo actors translated scenes from Macbeth into tape recorders and played it back to better the translation and memorize the dialogue. They helped create the performance as well as the sets for the Revolutionary Theater piece within the f’ilm. The rehearsals and choreography for the film were worked out with the help of Working Classroom, an Albuquerque theater group for artists from marginalized communities. Many of the actors were trained there and the collaboration with the organization helped create a real sense of community on the set. The Shining Path had a unique way of speaking based on didactic Gang-of-Four or Cultural-Revolution Maoism and Gonzalo-Thought, basically the sayings of their leader Guzman. The script is based on a core of interviews, readings and other research which was turned into a stylized version of a day in the life of the cellblock. The music for the film was created before filming by the same musicians that scored my film Interkosmos. I wanted the actors to be surrounded by the language, literature, art and music of the Shining Path to portray the characters as authentically as possible. I was drawn into making this film to try to understand how a 16-year-old Indian girl becomes a trained killer versed in Marxist rhetoric and willing to go to any lengths for a future society of great harmony.” Jim Finn

“Jim Finn has made a name for himself…thanks to his feeling for irony and his capacity to shape something new from propaganda, news and other historic images. Not to forget his very dry sense of humor” – Rotterdam International Film Festival’