The Memory of Butterflies

Emerging from the rubber boom’s shadows, the film recovers the stories of Omarino and Aredomi, two Indigenous boys enslaved by La Casa Arana and taken to Europe. Interweaving personal inquiry with early-twentieth-century Amazonian archives, it traces a sensory dialogue between memory, power and reparative imagination.

Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski: ‘The Memory of Butterflies began with a single photograph: a portrait of Omarino and Aredomi holding hands in London [...], which led me to search for them in archives across Peru, Brazil, Ireland, England, Portugal, the United States and France. Most images were propaganda from extractive and colonial expeditions in the Amazon.

The film demanded a montage that could deconstruct official historical narratives and reveal what these images conceal. Telling this story through a critical lens meant examining my own position and approach. Speculation allowed me to confront where we came from and what we inherited, and to imagine new futures in close alliance with the descendant communities where we filmed. The materiality of the analogue image became the materiality of memory — a speculative, ambiguous and undefined reality.’