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About Everything There Is to Know

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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.

In the middle of the Peruvian highlands, two children are sitting on a grave. 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 with unforeseen force these encounters.

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.

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