Sigo Siendo is about music but not a story just about musicians, is a film about a hidden country. I was born in Peru and lived the most important part of my life in Lima, that great city where families came from all corners of the country. Millions of people landed in the coastal capital leaving their communities, their culture, their sounds. The great migration that began in the forties and fifties turned Lima and its slums in a place of refuge for the other Peru, who came in search of a better life. Here they found a new life but not always what they sought. This film is about those people who came to the big city and never parted with their identity, which kept singing in their language, that maintained a unique way of playing the guitar, violin, harp, box drum, a way to tell stories, to say who they are. From music and from the great masters of our music, the film tells the diversity of Peruvian culture, the complexity of the country, its past and its present. The film is a story of return, the characters return to their places of origin where they composed their first songs. Personally this documentary is also for me a way to return a debt to a country I left behind, a place to tell and sing. — Javier Corcuera (Director).
“I AM STILL HERE (Sigo Siendo) is not a musical film, it’s a film about music and silence, tradition and change, the struggle to heal social wounds and vindication, humanity and nature and the overall syncretic reality of a country that still needs to come to terms with that.
The montage struggles from time to time to carry some of the characters but this is a minor issue in a complex mise-en-scène and what amounts to a commendable effort to pack the vastness that is Peru into under two hours.” — Úrsula Cox for Spanish Review Club.
About the filmmaker:
Javier Corcuera is a Peruvian director, who has been dedicated to documentary filmmaking since his first film, released in 1994. Corcuera films cover a gamut of themes and span the globe, but are connected by common thread– righting wrongs, and bringing to light violations of human rights. Each of his films including Winter in Baghdad, filmed during the American occupation in Iraq, won top prize at the Malaga (Spain) Film Festival and Best Documentary Film at the International Latino Film Festival of Los Angeles; The Back of the World, has it’s US premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Critic’s Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival. His film Invisible produced by Javier Bardem won the Goya Award Spanish Film Academy Best Documentary. In 2005 Corcuera founded the FiSahara Film Festival in the Polisario Refugee Camps in the liberated zone of Morocco. The festival just celebrated it’s 10th anniversary.
Paco de Onís grew up in several Latin American countries and is multi-lingual. Most recently, de Onís produced Skylight Pictures’ film Disruption, about women’s economic empowerment in Colombia, Peru and Brazil. In 2011 he produced Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (world premiere at Sundance 2011), a documentary detective story focused on the role of filmic and archival documentation in the prosecution of a genocide case against Guatemalan generals, and launched Granito: Every Memory Matters, a companion mixed media project developed to restore the collective memory of the Guatemalan genocide. One year after the release ofGranito: How to Nail a Dictator, the dictator of the title was charged with genocide and put on trial in Guatemala. Paco also served as the producer on Skylight’s film The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (world premiere Sundance 2009), a documentary accompanied by IJCentral, an interactive audience engagement initiative promoting global rule of law, developed at the BAVC Producer?s Institute in 2008. Prior to that, he produced State of Fear, a Skylight Pictures film about Peru?s 20-year “war on terror” based on the findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Paco the Executive Director at Skylight. Prior to his work at Skylight he produced documentaries for PBS (“On Our Own Terms” with Bill Moyers), National Geographic (“Secrets from the Grave”), and a range of other programs. Before producing television documentaries, he created music festivals in South America & the Caribbean, renovated and operated an arts/performance theater in Miami Beach, (The Cameo Theater) and owned and operated a Spanish-style tapas tavern in a 500-year old colonial house in Cartagena, Colombia.
