Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi has presented his new feature film, El corazón del lobo (The Wolf’s Heart), which is competing in the Official Section of the Festival de Málaga, where he has also received the Retrospective Award for his career. Lombardi returns to the origins of Sendero Luminoso terror with a film about fanaticism, violence and survival.
 
This political drama delves into the internal universe of the terrorist organisation Sendero Luminoso and the human consequences of the armed conflict that marked Peru's recent history, giving rise to a portrait of the inside of the guerrilla movement inspired by a true story, with which he seeks to complete the vision he began decades ago in his classic La boca del lobo.
 
The film tells the story of Aquiles, an indigenous Asháninka boy kidnapped by the guerrillas, who spends more than a decade inside the organisation. Through his own eyes, the viewer witnesses a devastating process that takes him from victim to combatant, as he struggles to preserve his identity and find an escape from a system marked by fanaticism and violence.
 
In a press conference, Lombardi explained that this project arose as a kind of dialogue with one of his most emblematic films, La boca del lobo, released in 1988, in which he approached the conflict from the army's perspective. Now, with El corazón del lobo, I felt I had to return to that period of Peruvian history to observe it from another angle and complete a view which, at the time, had only shown one side of the conflict.
 
The filmmaker acknowledged that for years he felt he had seen that period of violence from only one point of view. This is how this new film came about, as a way of settling a personal and cinematographic debt that consisted of delving into the closed world of the guerrilla movement and understanding how it worked from the inside.
 
For Lombardi, one of the most shocking aspects of this process was discovering the degree of brutality with which the organisation imposed its control over rural communities. Lombardi revealed that in researching the historical context, he was deeply shocked by the level of violence inflicted on peasants, who ended up being some of the main victims of the conflict.
 
The film is inspired by the novel El miedo del lobo (The Fear of the Wolf), by Peruvian writer Carlos Enrique Freyre, which tells the true story of a boy kidnapped by Sendero Luminoso and forced to grow up within the organisation. The discovery of this book was decisive for the development of the project, as it allowed him to explore in an intimate way what daily life was like within an insurgent group, and how relationships were built among its members.
 
Lombardi added that the figure of Achilles allowed him to tell the story from a deeply human perspective. In his opinion, the main character is a survivor who, despite being forced to take part in the violence of the group, retains a certain innocence and a constant will to move forward. Víctor Acurio Sicha, Jared Vicente Sánchez, Silvana Díaz Goicochea and Paul Ramírez Vergara complete the cast.
 
With a career spanning more than five decades and nearly twenty feature films, Lombardi is considered one of the great names in contemporary Latin American cinema. His work has been marked by a strong interest in the social and political conflicts of his country, from emblematic titles such as La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs) and La boca del lobo.
 
His new work marks the director’s latest foray into one of the most painful episodes of Peruvian history. With a raw and profoundly human look, the film invites us to reflect on the mechanisms of fanaticism and the extremes of violence to which human beings can be driven when they allow themselves to be swept along by a radical ideology.
 
The presentation of his new film at the Festival de Málaga also comes at a special moment for the filmmaker, who has been honoured by the event with an award in recognition of his career, consolidating his figure as one of the key voices of Ibero-American cinema.