Customer Reviews

The Incas Remembered

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This is one of my favorite documentaries. My interest in Peru comes from my affection for the soothing traditional folk music I've heard. This movie presents the wide range of culture and ethnic diffusion that makes this area so interesting. The history of the rise and fall of the Inca Empire is also quite remarkable. However, I like most how this movie presents its subjects artistically with mysterious and beautiful shots of the people and scenery to a backdrop of traditional music.

I saw a more recent documentary on Machu Picchu and I hated how it said almost nothing about the Incas, almost as if the place built itself. I appreciate this work because it did focus on the people. They made boats and bridges of grass and weeds. They lived communally like many Native American tribes to the north. They had taxation, even back then. To be honest, it showed a corpse and never brought up human sacrifices.

I have a love-hate relationships with reenactments in documentaries. They seems so fake and meant for the masses, but they also keep things moving unlike seeing one slide after the other. Here, there are no reenactments; instead, they show present-day native Peruvians doing things. They show some indigenous and Spanish paintings and I actually wish they could have shown more of that.

I thought the Spanish conquered Latin America almost simultaneously. However, this work said they took Mexico first, and then went to South America. I thought contemporaries let conquistadores off the hook for the genocide they caused. Here, I learned that the Spanish king was not happy that Francisco Pizarro killed his Incan counterpart. Pizarro was later killed by his crew. Very informative.