Pachamama

Pachamama, directed by Juan Antín, is a French-Luxembourg-Canadian animated film about Tepulpai, a boy in an Andean village who dreams of becoming a shaman, and his journey to the Inca capital of Cuzco to recover a sacred statuette stolen from his village, set on the eve of Francisco Pizarro's 1532 invasion of Peru. Director Antín, of Argentine and European descent, spent fourteen years developing the film, traveling through the Andes with his anthropologist wife to meet with shamans, and has described the project as a kind of apology for what his own European ancestors did. The film was originally intended as a stop-motion production; budget constraints forced a move to computer animation, but animators were instructed to deliberately mimic a stop-motion look. The film was nominated for Best Animated Film at the 2019 César Awards. Who it's for: anyone curious about an Andean tale set on the eve of the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire, built from a director's fourteen years of personal research and a distinctive stop-motion styled animation technique. Who it's not for: those wanting a deep exploration of Inca culture specifically, since some critics noted the film treats that side of the story less thoroughly.