Kicking off this week, the 2025 Berlinale features no shortage of exciting premieres. One on our radar is Peruvian filmmaker Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s La memoria de las mariposas (aka The Memory of Butterflies), which is world-premiering in the Forum section. The film evocatively explores the extractive, colonial rubber trade of the late 19th and early 20th century in Latin America, and we’re pleased to exclusive debut the first trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski found her attention grabbed by an old photo of two Indigenous men: taken to London to be ‘civilized’ around the turn of the 20th century, their names were known, but little else – Omarino and Aredomi. Sadowski felt compelled to dig deeper into the past. LA MEMORIA DE LAS MARIPOSAS deconstructs the official history of the extractive, colonial rubber trade of the late 19th and early 20th century in Latin America. Using black-and-white, hand-processed Super 8 imagery that could almost pass for the extensively researched and meticulously worked archival footage and historical photographs it cuts into and challenges, the film proposes a counter-history of the colonial project, one in which Sadowski self-reflexively questions her own position as filmmaker. Going beyond the archive, Sadowski shares the photo with the Indigenous peoples of Peru today, the descendants of Omarino and Aredomi, and films their interventions. A powerful cinematic invocation, LA MEMORIA DE LAS MARIPOSAS seeks to recover lost and overlooked stories of a generation devastated by the rubber boom, providing space for the ghosts which break from official memory.”
“THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES is born from a single photograph: the portrait of Omarino and Aredomi holding hands in London,” the director tells us. “Before their photo, I felt beckoned by them. I decided to follow their footsteps and began investigating, which led me to search for them in archives from Peru, Brazil, Ireland, England, Portugal, the United States, and France. Most were propaganda images from extractive projects and colonialist expeditions from the Amazon.
See the exclusive trailer below.
