This January 2023 interview between Jaime Luna Victoria and Jim Finn is a follow-up from a zoom discussion of an underground screening of La Trinchera Luminosa in Lima in late 2022. The film screening could not be advertised in Peru because of the Law against Support for Terrorism. Jaime Luna Victoria is a writer and film programmer based in Lima, Peru. He is the co-author of Las Mirada Múltiples: Cine Regional Peruano (2017). He has written for various newspapers and ran the Cine Club at Centro Cultural en Lima from 2004-16. He is currently a freelance programmer and screenwriter.
Video Details
Jim Finn & Jaime Luna Victoria | Spanish | Color | 8:05 | 2023
A few weeks before the recent arrest of the Peruvian president that sparked nationwide protests, the Cine Teatro Irracional in Lima screened Jim Finn's faux-documentary La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo. The screening and subsequent zoom discussion could not be advertised because of Peru's Law against Support for Terrorism. Video Data Bank asked film programmer Jaime Luna Victoria if he would continue the conversation with Jim for VDB TV.
La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement, from their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that they were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were just another front in the People’s War: “shining trenches of combat”. This film shows the intense indoctrination and belief system of the brutal Latin American insurgency.
"Seemingly filmed in the courtyard of a New Mexico motel (and yet the perfect simulation of a doggedly righteous agitprop), La Trinchera Luminosa is Finn’s most intractable work—at once historically rigorous and blatantly fabricated, politically correct and profoundly absurd. Is this jail, without guards or men, a madhouse or a perfect community? Are these inmates living in hell or paradise or a Blake-ian combination of the two?"
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Jim Finn’s movies have been called ‘Utopian comedies’ and ‘trompe l’oeil films’. His Communist Trilogy is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. "Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times wrote that "Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe." His work has screened at international, avant-garde and underground film festivals like Rotterdam, Validivia, BAFICI, Edinburgh and the New York Film Festival as well as museums, universities, cinematheques and microcinemas. He was born in St. Louis in 1968 to a family of Midwestern Catholic salespeople.
Jaime Luna Victoria is a writer and film programmer based in Lima, Peru. He is the co-author of Las Mirada Múltiples: Cine Regional Peruano (2017). He has written for various newspapers and ran the Cine Club at Centro Cultural en Lima from 2004-16. He is currently a freelance programmer and screenwriter.
La Trinchera Luminosa and other works by Jim Finn are available here for institutional screenings and educational collections. Jim's latest film, The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology, will premiere in May 2023 and be available for booking dates thereafter.