Wara Wara

The film is named for the eponymous main character, Inca princess Wara Wara (played by Juanita Taillansier ==Production background==

Velasco Maidana had previously directed The Prophecy of the Lake (La profecía del lago), a 1925 film and love story between an Aymara man and the daughter of a white landowner. The film was censored for its "social critique", and never shown. For Wara Wara, he inverted the gender roles (an indigenous woman falling in love with a white man), and changed the setting. The Prophecy of the Lake had been set in his own time, while Wara Wara was set four centuries earlier, so as to appear less shocking and avoid censorship. Wara Wara was inspired by Antonio Diaz Villamil's novel La voz de la quena. The film was shot in Bolivia, between La Paz and Lake Titicaca. It premiered at the Teatro Princesa in La Paz on 9 January 1930, and was shown thirty-two times. No copies were subsequently thought to have been kept, and Wara Wara became a lost film. ==Rediscovery==

In 1989, the director's grandson inherited some of his belongings, and discovered film reels among them, mostly in very good condition. They did not contain the film in its final form, but a jumble of shots, leaving little indication as to their proper order, save for references to the plot in press coverage at the time. The film thus had to be not just restored, but reconstructed. In addition, the precise original musical accompaniment was unknown. During the film's original release, music had been played live. , in charge of restoring the film, decided to add a soundtrack - taken partly from Velsaco Maidana's 1940 ballet Amerindia. Certain reels were quite badly damaged, and thus took a long time to restore. This was the case, in particular, of the film's ending, which only became viewable in 2009. The restored film's premiere was on 23 September 2010 at the Cinemateca Boliviana's centre in La Paz. The restoration was the topic of a book, Wara Wara. La reconstrucción de una película perdida, by filmmaker Fernando Vargas Villazon. ==Context and significance==

Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes, places Wara Wara in the context of the Bolivian state's "indigenist project" of the 1920s and 1930s. Wara Wara, like Pedro Sambarino's Corazón Aymara (1925), served as a "visual register of the modernization of the nation state" - thus, according to José Antonio Lucero of the University of Washington, "narrating a future of synthetic mestizo nation building". Lucero also notes that indigenous characters in the cinema of the time were orientalised and played by non-indigenous actors and actresses. Le Courrier described it as a "universal fairy tale, reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet's balcony, but which remains closer to Pocahontas"; it depicts the triumph of love over inter-ethnic hatred. ==See also==