ESTADOS GENERALES
Perú, Spain | Fiction | 76 min | S16mm | DCP | Color | 5.1 | 2025
Single channel film, 16mm transferred to digital video, 76 min
On production
Single channel film, 16mm transferred to digital video, 76 min
On production
Synopsis
A journey of a package of seeds that depart from the archives of the Botanical Garden in Madrid, and ends in an afro- peruvian village in the south coast of Perú, the place where the seeds were collected in a colonial expedition around 1800. Like a flare in the dark, the seeds will lighten different worlds and realities that hide in the shadows.
Research
The storage room labeled 'S59' in the Botanical Garden of Madrid's herbarium houses botanical material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily from former colonies, that cannot be cataloged in the official historical archive and constitutes a blind spot in the herbarium.
Conceived as a counter-narrative that explores the spectral capacity of the archive, 'ESTADOS GENERALES' re-imagines the return voyage of a parcel of seeds from this deposit back to the place where they were picked on the southern coast of Perú.
Since the colonial system, different polymorphous regimes of power extend and feed each other: colonialism, European modernity, anthropocentrism and Western technoscience. The film is conceived as a counter-narrative that explores the spectral capacity of the archive, offering a critical perspective to examine the continuity of contemporary neocolonial structures.
With the support of: ICAA Instituto de Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales, España; DAFO, Ministerio de Cultura, Perú; Ayuntamiento de Madrid, España
In collaboration with Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid; CSIC Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Centro Cultural Amador Ballumbrosio
Produced by Estudio RIEN, Walden Films, Tasio, Mauricio Freyre
Direction, Editing, Script: Mauricio Freyre
Director of Production: Tasio, Nicolas Carrasco
Executive Producer: Jimena Hospina
Assistant Director: Diego Cendra
Script: Violeta Janeiro
Editing: Maria Anton
Editing Consultancy: Paloma Polo
Art Direction: Dora Palomino
Decorator: Carmen Main
Direction of Photography: Marta Simões
Focus puller, Camera assistant: Carla Stebbing Belmonte, Kenty Aguirre
Gaffer: Juan Castillo
Scouting and Development Additional Photography: Pietro Bulgarelli
Scouting and Development Photographer: Mandarava Bricaire
Scouting Sound Archive Material: Tasio, Alberto Cendra Woodman
Bolex 16mm Archive Material: Mauricio Freyre
Boom operator: Luis Ortega
Color: Andreia Bertini
Sound: Amanda Villavieja, Mireilla Bellido
Sound Design: Paciencia & Mauricio Freyre
Design: Estudio RIEN
Sound supervision: UMMMSON
VFX: Estudio RIEN, Dvein films
With
Aitana Martinez Ortas, Carmen Macías Farré, Dora Palomino, Alberto Cendra Woodman, Ramón Morales Valverde, Leopoldo Medina, Eva García Ibañez, Susana Aguilar Valenciano, Luis Diego Guzmán Gutiérrez, Francisco Jose Minguela Sánchez, Francisco Garcia Pavón, Alberto Herrero Nieto, Izier Sanchez Zabala, Manuel Gester Suárez, Enrique Gimeno, Elisa Celda, Camille Reitzel Esteban, Mar del Corral, Osama Chami, Axel Heilenkötter, Luanda Palma Ballumbrosio, Gerard Valdez, Meylin Cenizario Zegarra, Miguel A. Ballumbrosio Guadalupe, Leonid A. Yllesca Lavalle, Eduhe Josué D. Moron, Suemely Tipacti Joya, Aylen Enriquez Alva, Alejandro Gomez Silvera, Carmen Matkovich Lazarte, Roberto Jesus Nicho Herrera, Ibeth Marjorie Martinez Huamaní, Jenny Sandiga Dueñas, Omar Villavicencio Almanza, Ernesto Manrique Carrillo, Sandra del Solar, Gabino Plasencio Galvez Cardenas, Gladys Jacho Quispe, Evelyn Saravia De la Cruz, Myriam Rosario Allcca Gutierrez, Linda J. Saafir, Dumah S. Saafir, Roxana Galeno Alvistur de Ballester, Miguel Angel Ballester Rodriguez, Wilmer Joaquin Molina Herrera, Diego Alexander Tueros Solari, Angie Jhosseling Esquivel Rodriguez, Evaristo Gilberto Ramos Magallanes, Juan Peñaloza Salas, Delia Apaza Duran
Labs: FIDLAB, Cine Del Mañana Festival De Lima, MAFIZ, MECAS Cine Casi Hecho, Porto/Post/Doc Encuentros De Coproduccion, REC Primer Test, Semilleru Lab, Interseccion Festival Internacional De Cine A Coruña
Director’s Notes
In the second basement of the herbarium of the Botanical Garden of Madrid is located the storage S59, a warehouse from the historical herbarium that gathers botanical material mostly coming from the eighteenth and nineteenth century mainly from the former colonies, that for several causes cannot be cataloged, assembled as discards, this vegetal matter constitutes a blind spot within the official archive.
Since the colonial system, different polymorphous regimes of power extend and feed each other: colonialism, European modernity, anthropocentrism and Western technoscience. The film is conceived as a counter-narrative that explores the spectral capacity of the archive, offering a critical perspective to examine the continuity of contemporary neocolonial structures.
The film enables dialogues between absent dimensions, between landscapes and specters, between bodies and shadows. For colonial science, the colonized plant world, beyond being a subject of study, constituted an economic tool, a capital to be exploited, and in turn an instrument of control and submission.
The importance of the seed resembles the ‘figure of the spectrum’ that Mark Fisher outlines in “Ghosts of My Life”, ‘which cannot be fully present: it is not a being in itself but indicates a relationship with what is no longer more or with what is not yet ... where psychoanalysis is also a science of ghosts, a study of how certain events that reverberate in the psyche are transformed into apparitions’.
From the beginning, the project has worked for me as an introspection exercise, a search around questions that personally have always hovered around me. Having been born and raised in Lima, and after living in Madrid for more than a decade, the ideas developed in the film were born from facts, imaginaries and fictions around me. Both myself and the film went through different latitudes, drawing sinuous lines between Peru and Spain, two spaces that in the film will dissolve. The story focuses on the plant world as a transmitter in order to access a reality that unfolds in the shadows.
The world that the film proposes, represents for me an oblique and critical view about the present moment, a state of emergency, a call for insurgency in a world that resists a single existence.