This Stolen Country of Mine

(Nuestro país robado)

Marc Wiese / Germany / 2022 / 93 min
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  • DocsMX Int. Film Festival

    Our America Competition Winner

  • German Documentary Film Music Award

    Best Music Alva Noto

  • Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival

    Special Mention

  • Munich Int'l Documentary Film Festival

  • Bozcaada Int'l Festival of Ecological Documentary

    Special Mention

  • CPH:DOX Int'l Documentary Film Festival

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Spanish with English subtitles - Spanish language audio description available *

With Paúl Jarrín Mosquera, Fernando Villavicencio

Chinese mining in Ecuador’s mountains sets the stage for an epic battle between eco-guerrillas and a corrupt government in an intensely dramatic documentary.

This Stolen Country of Mine follows Paúl Jarrín Mosquera, who leads the indigenous resistance against the exploitation of their land. Meanwhile, China uses the Ecuadorian government to turn the country into one of its new colonies, having made the country dependent on credit through a series of corrupt and greedy treaties. When journalist Fernando Villavicencio exposes these plots and gets access to the contracts between China and Ecuador, the government wants him silenced too. Both men are fighting for freedom in this battle against a superpower.

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Marc Wiese, the film exposes China’s massive hunger for natural resources and how during the last decade it has been aggressively operating to obtain access to these resources in Ecuador. The country is now stuck with the most Chinese debts in Latin America.

* Spanish language audio description available via All4Access App and/or .wav file when purchasing a DSL license.

Accessibility for these films was created by DICAPTA and funded under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education- Office of Special Education-OSEP, project “Enhanced Access to Video for Students with Sensory Disabilities through Emerging Technology,” TV Access H327C210001.

Press

“Elegantly made and with an evocative soundtrack by Alva Noto, This Stolen Country of Mine is a strikingly dramatic documentary about the consequences of globalisation and when a population rises up and protests.” – Mark Adams, Cineuropa

“A well-built and electrifying documentary about two heroes fighting against their corrupt government, who have brokered several disadvantageous loan deals with China. (...) Even though the film’s heroes face powerful opposition, the director creates a dynamic feeling that the forces of light will prevail in the end.” – Astra Zoldnere, Modern Times Review

“Using a combination of interviews, archive and heart-stopping frontline filmmaking, Marc Wiese follows the twin-pronged civil assault against the plundering of Ecuador, through the reporting of the dogged Villavicencio and through grass roots rebellions by the communities whose lands are being appropriated.” – Wendy Ede, Screendaily

About the Director
Marc Wiese is an award-winning German documentary filmmaker and member of the German Film Academy. Wiese has been making documentaries for 25 years and has worked in many conflict areas worldwide. He has won numerous international awards for his films.

Marc Wiese - This Stolen Country of Mine - Venezuela: Country of Lost Children

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Wiese is best known for Camp 14: Total Control Zone, about Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person known to have ever successfully escaped from a North Korean prison labor camp (where he was born), and to breach the borders of North Korea itself to China, arriving eventually in South Korea. Camp 14 received 15 international film festival awards and has been shown in more than 20 countries worldwide. BFI rated the film as one of the most important documentaries of our time.

In the last few years, Wiese has been working on The Dying Democracies Trilogy (2019-2023). The trilogy includes Venezuela: The Country of Lost Children (2023), which follows two single mothers and their children as they navigate the corruption and mismanagement that have turned Venezuela into a failed state; This Stolen Country of Mine (2022), featuring Ecuador’s late presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio as he exposes the corruption of his government contracts with China; and We Hold the Line (2020), on 2021 Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa’s fight against the Phillipines’ president-turn-dictator Rodrigo Duterte.

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