The Green Wall

Mario wants to leave his life in the city and take a piece of land for himself and his family in the Peruvian jungle near Tingo Maria. He answers the state’s call to settle the region, but the real wall in front of him is not the forest; it is a bureaucracy that signs no paper on time. The film gives the family’s arrival, their relation to the land and their friction with the authorities in an editing that breaks the order of events and runs like memory. The ending is bitter, and the bitterness is the result of neglect rather than of nature. Armando Robles Godoy, who put much of his own life into this film, is describing the years of the settlement campaign. The hundred and ten minute Peruvian production was completed in 1970 and took the top prize at the Chicago film festival.