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What is life like for a native in Argentina? And what may it be like soon? Filmmaker Thomas Heise chose a tiny village at the feet of the Andes – and the whole solar system – as the subject matter of his new film. We visited him. By Ralf Schenk

“What are you doing?” ask the children who are playing football on the town square in the centre of Rio Blanquito. “I’m setting up a film screen,” answers Thomas Heise, “I want to show you a film this evening.” “A film?” The children look at one another and shrug their shoulders. They only are familiar with films from the television and that only came recently when DVD technology arrived in their village. There are as good as no satellite dishes here for receiving television signals and there has never been a cinema.

Rio Blanquito is situated over 2,000 kilometres from Buenos Aires, on a plateau at the foot of the Andes. From Orán, the closest larger town in the province of Salta, one travels eighty kilometres on a stony, unpaved road into the mountains, crossing a number of rivers, which can be adventurous in the rainy season. Tourists very rarely stray into this region. It is the home of farmers and artisans, a total of about 1,500 men, women and children, members of the indigenous community of the Kolla, who have joined together to form the larger community of Tinkunaku.

Photo gallery: The jungle cinema

Thomas Heise, the director from Berlin, is not here for the first time. And the film that he wants to show on a big screen on the village square is not just any film. He shot it in Tinkunaku, over a period of six weeks in August and September 2009 and four weeks in February 2010. It is a film about the interplay between nature and humans, about work cycles, village festivals, rituals and daily familial life. It depicts a present-day that seems to be eternal and yet could be pushed aside by modernity, as everywhere in the world.

Bitter finale

“Why did you name your film Solar System?” asks Herminio Cruz, the president of the community, on the afternoon before the showing. “Because it is not just about Tinkunaku,” the director replies, “but about something that is universal; seasons, landscapes, the earth. About beginnings and endings.” It is an archaic universe preserved on film that may soon survive only in dreams – and in the cinema; ethnography and philosophy.

The idea of making such a film began three or four years ago and was born at the Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires. Upon the bicentennial of Argentina’s independence from Spain funds were available that were earmarked for cultural projects under the title German Visions of Latin America. The idea was to support social movements in Argentina through joint cultural initiatives – for example a sketch of the lives of the indigenous population.



For decades, the natives of the country were overlooked in the public awareness; appearing neither in newspapers nor on television. Only lately has a cautious opening of information policy been observable, yet a large number of Argentineans still know nothing about how and by what means the indigenous peoples live and how they are treated by the government, large estate owners and corporations.

The increasing pressure put on the Kolla people in Tinkunaku to change their lives, give up their fields to big business or open their remote paradise to tourism is not touched upon by the film. It would have required interviews and other explanations, which Heise consistently left out of his Solar System. He shows only what it means to live here. In a big, bitter, metaphorical finale, he also shows what might become of it.

Heise shot the last scenes of his film in Buenos Aires: an endlessly long drive along the slums to the south of the main railway station. They show a ghetto, surrounded by fences and walls, narrow, treeless, with mountains of rubbish sacks everywhere.

What will remain? What will disappear?

In the evening at nine, after sunset, the village square in Rio Blanquito has filled up. Whole families have come, with kith and kin, curious to view themselves and their lives on the big screen. Yet, there are also trepidations: What has this European made of us? They are tensely attentive during the showing. Only a couple of half-pints romp about; running behind the screen to see if the horses running into the front of the picture come back out behind the screen. Then, the film is over, there is applause and then many questions about everything under the sun, about what remains and what is disappearing. This was precisely what Thomas Heise hoped for.

“I would like to come back,” he says, “perhaps after seven years to see what has happened. And perhaps to put a camera in the hands of the young people of Tinkunaku – or the ones who have remained in their world. To get an inside view of the beauty, the contradictions and the conflicts of their lives in the Andes, the friction between tradition and modernity, their worries and their hopes.”

The film Solar System will be shown for the first time in Germany at the Berlin Volksbühne on 31 March 2011. In April, it will run at the documentary film festival in Nyon.