Presented by MELBOURNE FILMOTECA, Song Without a Name (Canción sin nombre). In Lima, Peru in the early 1980’s, Georgina’s newborn daughter is taken from her after birth. Her desperate search for the child leads her to the headquarters of a newspaper, where she meets a journalist who takes on the investigation.
Based on real events, Melina León’s debut feature has won 16 international prizes and is a powerful and beautifully crafted film. Inti Briones’ black & white photography is some of the best you’ll see this year.

“The premise of “Song Without a Name” is at once fact-based and the stuff of shadowed, surreal nightmares, and Peruvian writer-director Melina León’s artfully affecting debut feature splits the difference: Earthy with social detail from a despairing period of Peru’s recent history, it’s also shot, scored and styled like the most beautiful of bad dreams.”

“The film’s wistful, elegiac tone, immaculate monochrome cinematography and compassionate focus on disenfranchised indigenous women will inevitably prompt surface-level comparisons to Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”

“León’s world-building remains mesmerizing, steeped as it is in local lore, rituals and haunting traditional music. Strains of Andean charango meld with the more contemporary ambient textures of Pauchi Sasaki’s score, while Briones’ imagery is a constant marvel, whether finding the poetry in hailstones bouncing off asphalt or silhouetting Georgina’s daily, mountainous commute in long shot, like storm-blown frames of shadow theatre.”

Rating

MA 15+

Duration

97 MINS