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Altiplano (2009) - Peter Brosens & Jessica Hope Woodworth Synopsis: War photographer Grace (Jasmin Tabatabai), devastated by a violent incident in Iraq, renounces her profession. Her Belgian husband, Max (Olivier Gourmet), is a cataract surgeon working at an eye clinic in the high Andes of Peru. Nearby, the villagers of Turubamba succumb to illnesses caused by a mercury spill from a local mine. Saturnina (Magaly Solier), a young woman in Turubamba, loses her fiancé to the contamination. The villagers turn their rage on the foreign doctors, and in the ensuing riot Max is killed. Saturnina takes drastic measures to protest against the endless violations towards her people and their land. Grace sets out on a journey of mourning to the place of Max’s death. ALTIPLANO is a lyrical and probing film about our divided but inextricably linked world. Biography of Peter Brosens (Director): Born in Leuven, Flanders in 1962, Peter Brosens is a Belgian filmmaker interested in what happens far away from his native land. Brosens first visited Peru in 1984 where he did extensive fieldwork on the integration of invasion settlements in the city of Lima. From 1988 until 1990 he lived and worked in Guayaquil, Ecuador, studying migration from the Andes, and in 1992 he investigated epidemic forms of protest suicide in the central Ecuadorean highlands. His award-winning documentary The Path of Time is one of the results of this in-depth research. He then directed and produced his internationally acclaimed Mongolia Trilogy, consisting in the documentaries: City of the Steppes (1993), State of Dogs (1998) and Poets of Mongolia (1999). After 13 years of working on a range of projects in Mongolia, Peter Brosens returned to the Andean highlands to direct his second feature film with Jessica Woodworth, Altiplano. Biography of Jessica Woodworth (Director): Born in 1971, Jessica Woodworth is a former TV writer-producer-director, now working for cinema with Belgian filmmaker Peter Brosens, whose acclaimed common works to-date are Khadak (2006) and Altiplano (2009) and whose love for ethnography she shares. Before this stage in her career Jessica Woodworth had worked for television in Hong Kong and Beijing. After obtaining a degree in literature at Princeton University, Jessica Woodworth trained for classical theatre at Oxford University. In 1994 she began working in television in Paris and was then based in Hong Kong for two years. Woodworth obtained a Stanford MA in documentary film. In 2000 she received a Fulbright grant for her Moroccan documentary The Virgin Diaries, which was nominated for the FIPRESCI Award at the 2002 Amsterdam Int'l Documentary Film Festival (IDFA). |
