Directed by Teo Belton
The Wari Indigenous people of the Llupa community, located below the Cordillera Blanca of the Peruvian Andes, are facing an environmental disaster that is directly affecting their physical and mental health.
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Director Biography – Teo Belton
Teo Belton (1991, Zapopán, Mexico) is a French and Mexican film director and screenwriter based in Peru.
Teo embraces dreams, reality, and fiction and exposes the most intimate landscapes of nature, inspired by Colombian magical realism. In 2016 he directed the short film “Somnotoscope”, where he tells the story of a 19th century inventor who created a cinematograph capable of filming dreams, awarded at national festivals and by DAFO (Peruvian Ministry of Culture Award). That same year, he participated in the SONY Short Fest contest organized by the University of Lima and SONY, creating the short film “KA”, awarded first place. As part of the award, Teo and his team went to Las Vegas to exhibit the project at the prestigious NAB SHOW.
Belton’s fiction short-film, “SHEUT” (2017), had 18 official national and international selections, and won 18 international awards in several categories between 2017 and 2019.
In 2020, Belton worked on a documentary short film and multimedia project: “Dialogue with Plants”, focused on the health impact in the Peruvian Amazon with the support of the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Journalism Fund, showing his more versatile eye.
That same year, he started directing “Uroboros”, about a story of mourning and that aloud him to go back to surreal and science fiction overtones.
In 2021, he was awarded a National Geographic grant to film in the Peruvian Amazon. A documentary short film about an Awajun Indigenous man who travels in his memory to reconnect with the ways of existence of his culture, untitled “Cumbia’s Day”.
Later, he directed “Cuidantsiqmi”, a documentary supported by the Wellcome Trust Foundation, which reunites the Indigenous Wari testimonies about the climate change impact on their physical and mental health in the Cordillera Blanca of the Andes, in Peru.
Director Statement
Dedicating myself to film directing has allowed me to be versatile in my interest and ability to reveal unique worlds and atmospheres in both fiction and documentary.
I am interested in staging singular worlds, since I can understand them from my own life, forged from encounters and dreamlike journeys, since my childhood since I was born in Zapopan, a town in Mexico, where I lived and grew up with native peoples. Native cultures have always accompanied me and today they persist as memories that direct my gaze towards different ways of existing.
The cinema is for me, the possibility of continuing with an oneiric journey that marked my existence.
Documentary Film Festival. Los Angeles & Toronto 
