Our Home (Utama)

Alejandro Loayza Grisi / Bolivia, France, Uruguay / 2022 / 87 min / Spanish

Utama is a visually arresting, vividly coloured story about an elderly couple’s struggle to remain alive in the drought-ravaged Bolivian highlands.

On the parched expanses of the Bolivian Altiplano, Virginio and Sisa, an elderly Quechuan couple played by non-pros and a real-life couple, eke out a basic existence as llama farmers (“Utama” is Quechuan for “our home”). An extended drought has made an already challenging subsistence into a precarious struggle for survival. When the couple’s grandson, Clever, comes to visit from the city, they refuse to flee to the city. Would sacrificial offerings to the gods help? Is it true that when a condor feels it has become useless, it goes to the top of a mountain, folds its wings, and abandons itself to the void? In the world of Utama, the parched land, the flaming sunsets and majestic mountains fuel our imagination and imbue everyday realities with a mythical quality.

"I have more of a knack for images, rather than words. Silence can say so much more than words, and glances definitely say a lot more because the way people look cannot conceal what they feel. I wanted to use all of that, glances as well as silence, and I wanted the unexplored landscapes to talk, too. Likewise, I thought that in a relationship involving a couple who have lived together for so many years, which is the case for the protagonists, you wouldn’t need to talk a lot, because everything is said through small gestures or expressions."
- Alejandro Loayza Grisi