Quipu Project

In the 1990s, during his 10-year reign as president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori launched a new family planning program that resulted in the sterilization of 272,000 women and 22,000 men in only four years. They were almost exclusively rural and indigenous, and thousands have claimed this was done without their informed consent. In many cases the operations weren’t only involuntarily but they were also done poorly, and many suffered from painful complications afterwards. Because indigenous communities often live in isolated villages and are illiterate, it wasn’t until long after Fujimori’s resignation in 2000 that the injustice came to light, and even then only in dribs and drabs. Quipu Project gives these people a tool to make their voices finally heard. Quipus are knotted cords used by the Incas to convey complex messages, and this interactive documentary project of the same name is a contemporary incarnation of this system. Through a specially established phone line connected to a website, the testimonies of 150 sterilized people have already been collected, and the number of voices continues to grow. The project is being presented publicly for the very first time at IDFA 2015, and its creators intend on making a feature-length documentary the year after next.