WuWD@ DOK Leipzig 2024 - Claudia Chavez Levano & Christine Mladic Janney “Preserving Legacy: The Quest for Peru’s Film Pioneer, Nora de Izcue”
November 6, 2024
In this What’s Up Docs episode, I speak with the filmmaking team behind Searching for Nora: Claudia Chavez and Christine Mladic Janney. Searching for Nora celebrates the life and artistry of Nora de Izcue, the first Peruvian filmmaker to gain international acclaim and a passionate advocate for social justice and cultural preservation.
The conversation explores Claudia’s experience at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in Cuba—a film school co-founded by Nora and novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez—Christine’s connections to Peru and her advocacy for Quechua-speaking communities. They discuss their collaborative work on Searching for Nora, which follows their quest to locate original prints of Nora’s seminal film, Runan Caycau.
Their journey touches on the vital role of film archives, the significance of who holds them, and the broader challenges of being a documentary filmmaker and a mother. They also reflect on the past and present state of filmmaking in Peru, particularly in light of recent attacks on the National Film Law, which led to nationwide work stoppages and strikes.
Claudia’s Bio
Claudia Chavez is a Peruvian producer and, recently, a co-director. She has produced films such as The Catch, a short fiction film by director Thais Drassinower that premiered at the Tribeca Festival. She is also the producer of Hakuchu Munayta, a feature documentary by Augusto Zegarra, which received support from the Ministry of Culture of Peru and the Sundance Documentary Fund. In addition, she is the producer and co-director of the documentary Searching for Nora, currently in production, which was supported by the Sundance Institute Humanities Sustainability Fellowship (2022) and The Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been selected in the Co-production forum of the Guadalajara International Film Festival and DocsBarcelona. She is working on the impact distribution strategies for these two projects, which involves working with NGOs, activists, and communities, creating different platforms that help to raise awareness and expand the ecosystem of change. Claudia studied a production workshop at the EICTV in Cuba and has a Master's Degree in Audiovisual Distribution at ECAM in Madrid. She currently divides her time between Spain and Peru.
Christine’s Bio
Christine Mladic Janney is a Director/Producer and Sociocultural Anthropologist who is passionate about using film as a tool for political and social change and taking a decolonial and feminist approach to doing so. She has been the recipient of awards such as the Sundance Institute Humanities Sustainability Fellowship (2022) and the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2023). Her short documentary film Runasimiwan Kawsay (Living Quechua), featuring a Peruvian language activist and her efforts to strengthen a Quechua-speaking community in NYC, premiered at the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival and went on to screen at over 30 international festivals and events. It won the Award of the Festival Director at the ETNOFILM Festival in Slovakia and is distributed by Third World Newsreel. She holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and an Advanced Certificate in Culture and Media from New York University.
