The debut feature by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski, La memoria de las mariposas, emerges as a profound and necessary reflection on the painful and silenced colonial past of the Amazon, specifically in the Putumayo River region — the epicenter of the rubber boom in the early 20th century. The Peruvian filmmaker delves into the depths of historical memory through a meticulous and poetic engagement with archival materials, challenging official narratives and confronting the atrocities of the genocide perpetrated against Indigenous communities enslaved by the powerful rubber magnate Julio César Arana.

The film is structured around a complex amalgam of Super 8 reprocessed images and archival footage from various sources, including fragments of films with an inherently extractivist gaze, such as Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (1922) by Silvino Santos. By recontextualizing and subverting these images, Fuentes Sadowski exposes how cinema itself and the archive were complicit in, and part of, the extractive system that fueled the rubber boom in Peru and Brazil. Far from being a neutral repository, the archive is presented as a battlefield where the struggle over memory and historical interpretation is fought.

At the heart of the film lies the journey of Omarino and Aredomi, two Indigenous youths who, accompanied by Irish lawyer Roger Casement, were taken to Europe to denounce the enslavement of their people. The director uses the few existing photographs and Casement’s diaries to reconstruct and fictionalize their trajectory, turning their story into living testimony of the barbarity they endured. However, Fuentes Sadowski does not idealize humanitarian initiatives. Instead, she situates them within the broader complexity of colonialism, portraying Casement and the progressive European bourgeoisie as another face of the same system.

The film goes beyond historical investigation by intertwining the story of Omarino and Aredomi with the director’s own personal experience as the mother of a descendant of one of the families who profited from the rubber boom. This layering of perspectives, born from a desire to analyze and comprehend a heavy past, blends with the cultural legacy of genocide survivors and their ways of relating to history. Fuentes Sadowski’s first-person narration guides the viewer, inviting them to scrutinize the images and search for those spectral presences that have no material inscription on the surface of the archive.

The film’s editing is an act of resistance. By intervening, reframing, filtering, and fragmenting the images—many of which were originally filmed to catalogue and oppress—the filmmaker demonstrates cinema’s power to subvert dominant narratives and become a tool of knowledge. The red-tinted footage signals the extreme violence inflicted on Amazonian Indigenous peoples, while the montage techniques expose the cracks and fissures in the archive, revealing where official history has silenced certain voices and erased events. Fuentes Sadowski approaches the materials not as distant objects but through the filter of personal memory and affect, seeking to take a stance toward her historical inheritance.

La memoria de las mariposas aligns with a growing trend in contemporary Latin American documentary filmmaking that relies on archives and autobiography to explore questions of memory and violent pasts. By combining heterogeneous filmic and photographic materials—including images she herself filmed and processed in Super 8 to thicken the atmosphere of the Amazon—the director imagines a materiality that does not exist, fictionally reconstructing history from ghostly presences.

Fuentes Sadowski’s work proposes a journey of textures, blurred and atmospheric, echoing the processes of historical recomposition. Although the ultimate fate of Omarino and Aredomi remains shrouded in mystery, the film fulfills an urgent task: acknowledging that recovering invisible and underground memories is also an act of imagination. This is a film that seeks to give space to voices that represent the repressed counter-narrative to official history, offering the possibility that from this journey a new memory may emerge — one grounded in territory and projected toward a more just present.