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Antuca & Porque quería estudiar (12*) + ScreenTalk with director María Barea & Dr. Maria Chiara D'Argenio

Cinema Restored x Open City Documentary Festival

,Cinema 2
A 35mm film still of a group of women dressed up for ceremony in white clothes and headdresses.

Join us for this special presentation of two works delving into the realities of domestic workers' struggles.

Antuca & Porque quería estudiar are Peruvian films, made by María Barea. These films were made in collaboration with Warmi Cine y Video, the pioneering Peruvian women’s film collective (est. 1989) and Iprofoth (Instituto de Promoción y Formación de Trabajadoras del Hogar), a non-profit dedicated to empowering migrant and Indigenous women domestic workers.

Antuca adopts a docu-drama format, focusing on the life of its titular character, Antuca, portraying her journey from Cajamarca to Lima and her involvement in political activism amid employment shifts and identity challenges. 

Porque quería estudiar is a testimonial documentary from 1989 that portrays the harsh reality of hundreds of migrant girls and young women who must travel to the city in search of work as domestic workers.

Tagged with: Cinema Cinema Restored

Presented in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival.

Thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo, Daniel Ángeles, Kauri Ximon Jauregui Arias, Julio César Gonzales Oviedo, Maria Palacious Cruz and Ollie Wright from Open City Documentary Festival.

Programme

PORQUE QUERÍA ESTUDIAR 

María Barea and Warmi Cine y Video 

Peru 1990 DCP Original version with English subtitles 31m

ANTUCA

María Barea and Warmi Cine y Video 

Peru 1992 DCP Original version with English subtitles 72m

Restoration

The restoration of Antuca has been done between 2023 and 2024 in the Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE) at San Sebastian by Film Archive students from Perú, México and the Basque Country within the framework of the project "Preservation of the films of María Barea and Warmi, Colectivo Cine and Video: First collective of women in Peruvian Cinema" in collaboration with Warmi Cine and Video from Perú. 

Biographies

MARÍA BAREA (b. 1943, Chancay, Peru) worked for over 30 years as an actor, director and producer of films. In 1982 she co-founded the film group Chaski with which she has made the films Gregorio and Miss Universo en el Peru. In 1989, she co-founded the women's film group 'WARMI Cine y Video', with which she produces and directs documentaries. Her films include, Mujeres del Planeta (1982), Andahuaylas - suenen las campanas. Andahuaylas - ciudad hermana (1987), Porcon (1989/92), Porque queria estudiar (1990), Barro y Bambu (1991).

Dr. Maria Chiara D'Argenio is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at University College London, where she teaches since 2016. She specialises in Latin American Cinema and Visual Culture. She is the author of Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) as well as of several articles on Peruvian cultural production, and the coeditor of Periodicals in Latin America: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Serialized Print Culture (University of Florida Press, 2024).

Cinema 2

Location
Barbican Cinema 2 & 3 are located on Beech Street, a short walk from the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance. From Silk Street, you’ll see a zebra crossing that will take you across the road to the venue. 

Address
Beech Street
London
EC2Y 8DS

Public transport
The Barbican is widely accessible by bus, tube, train and by foot or bicycle. Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance.