What happens when the right to love who you want becomes an act of resistance?
Peruvian filmmaker Sami Hawka is developing a feature, “While Everything Falls” (Afuera Todo Arde), which explores the fight for personal freedom under a fictionalized dictatorship in contemporary Peru.
The story takes place in a conservative rural community where two members of a polyamorous triad marry to keep up appearances. But when their relationship is exposed by their third lover, they flee to the capital, where they become involved in a rebellion against the dictatorship and discover that their fight for personal freedom is inseparable from the struggle for Indigenous rights, the rights of other marginalized communities and economic equality.
The Madrid-based filmmaker’s project is gaining momentum after being selected for the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Business Hub Co-Productions Forum and the Queer Palm Lab, an LGBTQ-focused development program associated with the Cannes Film Festival. Hawka is now pursuing international co-production partners and funding for the feature.
“The film follows these characters who are in their bubble,” Hawka tells Variety. “But when they break [out of] the bubble, they start realizing that they have other forms of oppression” beyond queerness and polyamory, and that they share those experiences with other marginalized groups.
“In this rebellion, there are also a lot of Indigenous people and Indigenous movements that need vindication of their rights,” Hawka says, connecting the story to Peru’s colonial history and its enduring consequences.
“When we as a culture experienced that…It had a very strong impact on our culture and on the lives that we had here.”
Peru developed into a country that’s fractured, they explain. “These people still need some sort of citizenship in this new order that’s not organized to fit their needs, or was built on inequality.”
For Hawka, the story is also an extension of their own experiences as a nonbinary person with Indigenous roots.
They spent a significant part of their childhood in Cusco, in Peru’s Andean highlands, attending an intercultural school where they learned Quechua and developed connections with Indigenous elders and spiritual traditions. Those experiences helped shape both their understanding of gender and their approach to filmmaking.
“I think it has helped me situate a place that needs vindication,” they say. “It has helped me look at things from a perspective where rights need to get acknowledged, and where political action needs to start.”
Colonialism and cultural erasure, they argue, have also shaped attitudes toward sexuality and gender, leaving a complicated legacy that younger generations are now working to understand and reclaim.
“There are documents of many places in the world where societies had more than two genders, and that was sort of erased, and now we are starting to reconnect with that,” they say.
In Peru, they point to archaeological ceramics depicting same-sex encounters by shamans in sacred ritual contexts. “Now it’s kind of our work to go back and try to rescue all these things.”
For them, reconnecting with Indigenous traditions has also been a way of understanding their own identity.
At its core, Hawka says, the film they want to make is about how authoritarian systems restrict people’s ability to determine their own lives.
“Power can invisibilize and oppress people in different ways— around class, around gender, around race, around economic privilege,” they say.
Eventually, the characters come to recognize that their own experiences of marginalization connect them to a larger struggle.
“They realize that they need to join the resistance in order to be free themselves too,” says Hawka. “It’s like a collective thing.”
The visual approach will reflect the tensions between the characters’ private lives and the political upheaval around them. Hawka envisions contemplative, quiet scenes in the countryside, with natural light and a documentary-like approach, contrasted with the noise, intense colors, and chaos of the city. They aim to show the “places and spaces inhabited the way they actually ar
The film is being developed by Peruvian production company FILMA+ as an international co-production, with casting still open and discussions with potential producers underway. After development had stalled, recently “the project has taken a giant leap,” they say.
Ultimately, says Hawka, “While Everything Falls” uses an unconventional love story to explore how people can reclaim the freedom to determine one’s own destiny and fight for what they believe — both individually and collectively — in the face of authoritarianism and oppressive power.
Whether it’s about polyamory, or homosexuality — there are a lot of rules that are imposed by power, they say. Social punishment, they note, is also an “exercise of power.”