Selected for VIFF’s Business Hub Co-Productions Forum and the Queer Palm Lab, the film explores marginalized communities and political resistance under a fictionalized dictatorship What happens when the right to love who you want becomes an act of resistance? Peruvian filmmaker Sami Hawka is developing a feature, “While Everything Falls” (Afuera Todo Arde), which explores the fight for personal freedom under a fictionalized dictatorship in contemporary Peru. The story takes place in a conservative rural community where two members of a polyamorous triad marry to keep up appearances.
But when their relationship is exposed by their third lover, they flee to the capital, where they become involved in a rebellion against the dictatorship and discover that their fight for personal freedom is inseparable from the struggle for Indigenous rights, the rights of other marginalized communities and economic equality. The Madrid-based filmmaker’s project is gaining momentum after being selected for the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Business Hub Co-Productions Forum and the Queer Palm Lab, an LGBTQ-focused development program associated with the Cannes Film Festival. Hawka is now pursuing international co-production partners and funding for the feature.
They spent a significant part of their childhood in Cusco, in Peru’s Andean highlands, attending an intercultural school where they learned Quechua and developed connections with Indigenous elders and spiritual traditions. Those experiences helped shape both their understanding of gender and their approach to filmmaking. In Peru, they point to archaeological ceramics depicting same-sex encounters by shamans in sacred ritual contexts.
At its core, Hawka says, the film they want to make is about how authoritarian systems restrict people’s ability to determine their own lives. Eventually, the characters come to recognize that their own experiences of marginalization connect them to a larger struggle. Hawka envisions contemplative, quiet scenes in the countryside, with natural light and a documentary-like approach, contrasted with the noise, intense colors, and chaos of the city.
They aim to show the “places and spaces inhabited the way they actually ar The film is being developed by Peruvian production company FILMA+ as an international co-production, with casting still open and discussions with potential producers underway. After development had stalled, recently “the project has taken a giant leap,” they say. Ultimately, says Hawka, “While Everything Falls” uses an unconventional love story to explore how people can reclaim the freedom to determine one’s own destiny and fight for what they believe — both individually and collectively — in the face of authoritarianism and oppressive power.
Whether it’s about polyamory, or homosexuality — there are a lot of rules that are imposed by power, they say. Social punishment, they note, is also an “exercise of power.”
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