The Visitor

“A common thread through my previous films is an exploration of filial and parental relationships through characters that face adverse situations such as abandonment, forced exile, or family exclusion. This has been an endeavor built from my long-standing interests in understanding how social conditions affect emotional bonds.

In The Visitor, I wanted to complicate and push this notion further by portraying the growing power of the Evangelical Church in our region, and how these institutions, as businesses, are capitalizing on the suffering of society’s most vulnerable. Taking this as my starting point, I was also able to investigate my country’s evolving structures of power, colonial heritage, and the new forms of ideological dependence that are emerging within Bolivian society.

We chose to shoot the film in Cochabamba, a medium-sized city located in the center of Bolivia. The city, situated in a valley, was historically a supplier of food and textiles for the mines, but now subsists largely off of public services, industry and commerce.

Cochabamba has been the epicenter of historical social struggles between Bolivia’s indigenous population and the Spanish colonizers, with present-day manifestations of the continued legacy of colonialism still palpable around us; such was the case with the ‘Water Wars’ that took place in 1999 and 2000. The city has two very marked social poles: a brave working class and a very conservative semi-colonial bourgeoisie, which coexist in continuous tension.

The most difficult part of making this film was the fact that we were shooting during the three weeks of political unrest in 2019, a crisis that culminated in a civil-military coup and the death of many civilians. Due to contracts that we had with the State around the acquisition of film funds, we had no alternative but to film over the preset dates. As such, we lived those social conflicts up close, in the streets, while we did everything possible to finish the film. At some point we had to stop because it became impossible to shoot.

As President Evo Morales was forced to resign, the minority party seized power and brought the military into the streets and began open firing. Before my own eyes, I saw the military helicopters stalking the peasants who arrived in the city to protest and express their discontent. I also saw the military tanks crossing the streets. The Sacaba massacre took place five minutes from my house. Soldiers killing civilians… I thought we had left this sort of horror in the 70s, before I was born. But no, the nightmare had returned, and I witnessed it with my own eyes. The film is not about any of this, but it certainly tries to portray a society that continues to regenerate different forms of colonial domination.

In 2019 the government implemented a program to give funds to artistic projects, including cinema. For the first time in many years this finally came to pass, and The Visitor and other films were recipients of these funds. Many of us believed that the landscape had finally changed for the better, since we are the only country in the region that didn’t already have a national fund to support cinema. A few months later, everything changed for the worse. A de facto government stormed in by closing the national cultural ministry and defunding it.

Now that we have returned to having a democratically elected government, we are fighting to recover the gains that we fought for years. But it’s difficult, there are reactionary forces within the country that are not interested (or rather, are afraid of those things that could harm their interests) in there being a law that supports and protects filmmakers. The Visitor is my attempt to address all these intersections at play in my country.”

– Martín Boulocq, Director