Unquiet Ground

“In its distortion, memory holds a deeper truth about the world we live in.” With this sentence from her fieldwork diary, in Unquiet Ground Martha-Cecilia Dietrich opens a window onto Peru, a country where the quest for truth and redress painfully continues more than 25 years after the armed conflict.

The filmmaker’s voice guides her viewers through this experimental ethnographic film. “Let me take you to a place that is dear to me,” she begins, taking the audience to Ayacucho in the Peruvian highlands – a region once ravaged by the “Shining Path” terrorist organization and the government’s armed forces. Unquiet Ground was shot entirely with a 360-degree camera but is projected onto a screen in flat format. The view curves; lines bend; landscapes and spaces slide into one another. The distortion becomes an image of memory itself.

Dietrich carries the 360-degree camera’s tripod herself and is usually visible in the frame, thus blurring the line between in front of and behind the camera. For over a decade, she has accompanied people – predominantly women – as they search for the mortal remains of their loved ones. Her voiceover narration ties together contemporary scenes and archival footage, including material from her personal video archive, while at the same time telling the story of her own family’s displacement.

When human bones and articles of clothing are discovered during construction work, the film documents the identification and burial of the missing persons. Yet ultimately, Unquiet Ground refuses to offer a straightforward reconstruction. The distortion created by the 360-degree camera produces a panoptic yet dreamlike visual language of great intensity: one that makes no pretense that time heals wounds. (Michaela Schäuble)

Translation: John Wojtowicz