In The Reminiscence of Butterflies, Peruvian filmmaker Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski takes us on a journey that resists the brutality of Western colonialist savagery and provides us an beautiful, painful and dream-like odyssey that dares us to face the truth of our previous.
The inspiration for this documentary movie got here from an album of images utilized by the Peruvian Amazon Firm within the early 20th-century as propaganda for his or her industrial rubber considerations. Inside it, Sadowski discovered a posed picture of two boys known as Omarino and Aredomi, (slaves from the Witoto tribe in Putemayo, Colombia) wanting instantly on the digital camera. This picture was the start of a near-ten yr journey for the director as she tried to seek out out what occurred to those boys.
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Sadowski describes how, “their photograph calls me, questions me.”. For years she, ”appeared for each little bit of details about that {photograph}. Who have been Omarino and Aredomi? Did they ever return? Then what occurred to them?” All through the movie it’s as if these “ghosts” are talking on to her. She started to dig, by way of worldwide and UK archives, her analysis spanning over a hundred years of colonial historical past. As anticipated, what she discovered is drenched within the colonial gaze.
Within the ensuing movie we’re drawn into the brutal world of the rubber business by way of the interventions of Roger Casement, British consul in Peru. Requested by the International Workplace to analyze reported abuses of indigenous peoples by the Peruvian Amazon Firm within the Putamayo area, Casement – heralded in historical past as a passionate anti-colonialist – determined to make use of Omarino and Aredomi to publicise their abuses. He took the boys from Peru, bringing them to London after which Eire.
Denied an interpreter, the pair have been proven off to British dignitaries and excessive rating clergy, whereas archives show that their function was deemed an ‘experiment’. They have been nonetheless slaves.
This isn’t a chronological historical past, and it may possibly’t be. Not simply because there may be little or no details about the topics and what lastly occurred to them, however as a result of it’s clear from the movie’s opening scenes that Sadowski is before everything an artist. By way of her impressed use of archive footage, seen by way of the lens of an evocative photographic body on display screen, in addition to uncommon use of domestically recorded atmospheric sound (superbly crafted by sound artist Félix Blume), we all know we’re within the fingers of somebody seeking to elevate the story by way of lyricism and poetry.
All through the movie, uncommon transition markers, like the usage of a stamping native foot, whose sound virtually sings to us, focus our focus because the story shifts from the previous to the current and we’re led into this dream-like world. Sadowski makes use of archive footage, some from the Portuguese filmmaker Silvino Santos Documentary Journal 16 June 2025 alongside her personal Tremendous 8 movie, charting her journey as she searches not just for solutions as to the destiny of the 2 boys, however connects with current day tribes in Puerto Rico, La Chorrera and the Putemayo area, to invest as to what this story means to them now.
This movie is about remembering, however not within the Western sense, which favours a conclusion. As an alternative, Japanese storytelling values are embedded and the story stays open ended. It seems like what issues is our private response to the journey of the 2 boys and the administrators’ odyssey, and never a singular conclusion. That remembering is considered by way of the lens of different indigenous individuals from locations like Puerto Rico and La Chorrera. Sadowski is cautious in her respect for them, handing again to them the reminiscences of Omarino and Aredomi.
