Sepa, Nuestro Señor de los Milagros: Film Review
The Swiss film producer Walter Saxer made his first trip to the Amazonian jungle in Peru in 1977. He worked there for five years as the lead production manager for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which is well-known today for its troubled production history. As Saxer maneuvered the film’s heavy logistical demands — which included transporting a 320-ton steamship over a hill — he often had to cross a checkpoint at Sepa, an unorthodox penal colony along the Urubamba River.
Fitzcarraldo
Unlike in most prisons, Sepa’s 245 inmates lived in the open air, each allotted their own piece of land. Five years after Fitzcarraldo’s completion, in 1987, Saxer returned to Peru to make a documentary about Sepa and its residents, his sole effort as a director. The film sat in a closet for over 30 years before it was finally shown to the public, receiving a brief North American theatrical tour in October 2022.
In spite of its long-delayed release, this mesmerizing work remains timely and illustrative both for its subject matter and its mastery of documentary practice. It begins with disturbing news footage of the deadly March 1984 riots at El Sexto prison in Lima. We learn that severe overcrowding is the norm in Lima’s prisons — Lurigancho, for example, held over 7,000 inmates at the time of filming, despite only having capacity for 1,500. The jail’s faceless concrete blocks gradually give way to an areal view of Peru’s vast jungle as the camera transports us to Sepa.
The warden, Don Elias, an easygoing man who refers to the prisoners as “Mis Ángelitos,” explains that Sepa covers 36,000 hectares of land, enough to house Peru’s entire prison population. When things heat up at Sexto or Lurigancho, prisoners are selected at random and sent to the outdoor penal colony. “How is rehabilitation of inmates possible in prisons that are so overcrowded?” Elias asks. “If the prisons in Lima were…not the human sardine cans that they are, we wouldn’t have these problems.” The rest of the documentary makes a strong case that the effectiveness of prison rehabilitation is inextricable from the conditions of the prison itself.
Saxer understands our instinctive need to create a division between us — law abiding citizens — and them — dangerous criminals. In the opening image, we see a tattooed prisoner looking directly at the camera. We hear Saxer speak in an uncomfortable voiceover (written by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa), as if the prisoner weren’t standing there looking at us: “Why is he here?…All we know is that he is an ordinary prisoner.” In this way, Saxer addresses head on our impulse to judge an inmate before we’ve learned the facts of their story, to objectify him as if he’s not only left mainstream society but the broader community of mankind itself.
Walter Saxer and his daughter, Micaela
Throughout the film, Saxer introduces each prisoner in a similar way. They speak directly to the camera and give us their name, nickname, crime and sentence — the basic facts which might ordinarily be all we need to form an opinion. But those assumptions start to dissolve as we follow the different lives they lead: a farmer who lives with his children and was acquitted of his crime but still incarcerated; a garrulous, wild-mustached American who builds a home for himself where he intends to live at the end of his sentence; a young man with scars from his torture at the hands of Lurigancho prison officers.
We find ourselves forgetting their crimes and getting lost in their day-to-day environment, their personalities, the pieces of their lives which are far-removed from their crimes yet no less valid. The film’s beautifully rendered sound design further immerses us, surrounding us with the rain, the calls of roosters, snorting of pigs and the chirping of birds.
Sepa is not a paradise — as one inmate says, “It’s still a prison.” Because of corruption in Peru’s legal system, release papers often get lost. Many of Sepa’s inmates remain months and sometimes years past the completion of their sentences, stuck there in an indefinite purgatory. This adds to the film’s dreamlike quality, so that we wonder if this abandoned piece of jungle where prisoners lived like freemen even really existed.
Sepa has been closed since 1993, but prisoners continue to suffer from overcrowding all over the world. We see that in the recent deaths of 39 people in a Ciudad Juarez migrant detention center. Those searching for ways to mitigate this crisis, or even just feel a little closer to the lives of incarcerated people, might find a good starting point in the improbable experiment that Saxer so beautifully captures.