El Coraje del Pueblo

When a talented political film-maker like Sanjines aims a film at a very specific audience (to elucidate that audience's past and present oppression and, hopefully, radicalise its future), then the film may lose much of its impact when transposed to a different culture. So it is with Courage of the People, a bleak representation of a 1967 massacre of Bolivian tin miners by the army, reconstructed with the participation of survivors. Introduced by the depiction of a similar event in 1942, the film progresses to the '67 massacre, depicting the workers' growing resistance without analysing the move towards more radical action.