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Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski notes: “the ghosts who inhabit these images weren’t asked if they could be captured, nor did they approve them, and in many cases they were forced to appear in them”. She shows these images within a larger compilation of black and white archival footage on screen. The historic depictions in question are photographies and archival film footage of the Indigenous people of Peru, Sadowski’s home country. Its complicated history of colonialism and collective trauma has shaped her filmic work.

At the centre of the personal account is Sadowski’s emotional reaction to a photograph of two indigenous Peruvian men, named Aredomi and Omario, taken around 1910 of. They wear western clothes and hold each other’s hand, though it’s unclear if they were told to do so or if it’s a spontaneous gesture. Sadowski recounts how the image caught her eye and ingrained itself in her memory, even though she couldn’t tell what set this one apart from the other historical pictures she was looking through.

Her attempt to find out more about the men led her on a trail to the horrors of Peruvian colonial times. Enslavement, rape, torture, mutilation, killings and even mass murder of adults and children alike were common on the rubber plantations such as those of Julio Cesar Arana. Devious, deceitful and sadistic, the influential merchant and later politician would become infamous as main perpetrator of the Putamayo genocide. His atrocities reached an extend that shocked even his contemporaries. One of them was Irish diplomat Roger Casement who had investigated the crimes of Leopold II in the Congo prior to his detachment to Peru.

There he found more than proof of Arana’s human rights violation, which he detailed in his diary. Excerpts of his writings provide commentary to the archival footage of indigenous people, footage which was largely commissioned by Arana’s company. It’s a significant pairing that reminds the audience of Casement’s complicity in the colonialist wrongs. While he intended to stop Arana, he also presented and treated the Indigenous people as objects of anthropological interest. He took them to London for European intellectuals could to study them, to talk to them and to gape at them.

In such poignant moments of creative juxtaposition and interconnection, Sadowski manages to deconstruct the European humanitarian ideal and to highlight the many facets of the colonialist perspective. The shortcomings of the film also lie in this complexity. The Memory of Butterflies could become intellectual fodder for a predominantly European audience. This provokes the question: does this work serve as counter-narrative to the colonial perspective, or does it cleverly repurpose it precisely for colonialist objectives? Both the story of Aredomi and Omario, and the intertwined colonial history leave many gaps. The director fills them with vague musings and her own feelings, which distract from the essential facts of which the images are a brutal reminder.

The Memory of Butterflies premiered in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale.