About Everything There Is to Know was shot in Santiago de Chuco, an Andean town in northern Peru, where the writer César Vallejo—one of the most important Latin American authors of the 20th century—was born and raised. The isolated town was also the main setting for the writer’s poems.
Using the pretense of a casting call, filmmaker Sofia Velázquez records first-person tales to portray the memories of different people and, through them, that of an entire town.
Two children are sitting on a grave in the middle of the Peruvian highlands. A woman knits, and another cooks. An agricultural engineer dances while dreaming of hybridizing avocados with oranges. Everyone recites César Vallejo: his verses—dark, truculent, combative—inhabit these encounters with unforeseen force.
Informed by the legacy and aura of the literary icon, the film manages to interrogate with subtlety and emotion the tensions between oral and written tradition, avant-garde literature and popular culture.
