Bolivian film collective (1966–1980s) — Jorge Sanjinés, Óscar Soria and others. Weaponized cinema against imperialism and exploitation.
At the end of the 1960s, a film collective formed in La Paz that radically conceived of cinema as an instrument of social transformation—not as an art form in itself, but as a weapon against structural exploitation. Jorge Sanjinés and his comrades (including cinematographer Óscar Soria) worked according to one principle: the film belongs to the people, not to capital. They shot on 16mm, with mobile crews, without studio security—because mobility meant freedom and improvisation guaranteed authenticity. Their approach was not documentary in the classic sense, but dramaturgical-agitational: they constructed narrative scenes that made the invisible visible—the daily annihilation of indigenous workers, the mechanisms of colonial exploitation in the mining regions of Bolivia.
The power lay in the method. The collective did not film about the oppressed, but with them, often in their native languages (Quechua, Aymara). The editing followed no commercial rhythm, but a political one: long sequences that forced reflection, no manipulation through music or rapid cuts. The camera was steady, observing, sometimes even static—as if it were witnessing, not seducing. Films like Yawar Mallku (1969) or El coraje del pueblo (1971) were made under conditions of extreme censorship and physical danger; Sanjinés was repeatedly forced into exile.
What distinguished Grupo Ukamau from European avant-garde cinema or Soviet propaganda film was a crucial difference: they did not want to manipulate the masses, but to organize them. Film was an organizing tool—it was shown in mining settlements, discussed, intended to lead to action. This is not the same as agitprop. It was militant cinema with a sociological perspective, montage-conscious like Eisenstein, but territorially anchored, specifically anti-imperialist, and radical in its concreteness.
The collective dissolved in the 1980s as the political situation intensified and its members were dispersed. But its influence on Latin American political cinema remained structural—it showed how visual language, editing rhythm, and production methods are not neutral, but fight ideologically and materially. Anyone who speaks today of decolonial filmmaking or participatory cinema is operating in terrain that Grupo Ukamau had already mapped.