Sepa, Nuestro Señor de los Milagros

Nuestro Señor de los Milagros Our Lord of the Miracles, is the name of a swamp-glittering prison colony in the remote Peruvian jungle on the Rio Sepa. This is the dumping ground where the worst prisons in the country send their toughest of the tough. A bizarre island of freedom where tragedy and absurdity create a close-in world seemingly invented from feverish dreams. Here are murderers who survived the taking of hostages and the subsequent massacre at Lurigancho prison (documented in the film), and prisoners who have done 8 years extra time simply because their release papers were lost; there is one who fought his way from the highlands on foot, taking weeks to get here to serve his sentence. There is also a headhunter, a drug boss and “el Invisible”, the invisible one. The 65 year old, half deaf prison director, Don Elias, in tropical clothing, and wearing a straw hat, calls them all “mis angelitos”, my little angels.
-Werner Herzog

Having languished in a closet for more than 30 years, this newly rediscovered film is a unique documentary record of a bold and troubling experiment in criminal justice. A collaboration in between Walter Saxer, the producer of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Sepa, Nuestra Señor de los Milagros observes an open-air penal colony of the same name, created in 1951 by the Peruvian government in the Amazonian jungle. Tasked with growing crops on these colonized lands, the inmates were permitted to roam freely, commune with their families, and dance and cook together, yet they soon found themselves in despair, abandoned and forgotten by their country and the world at large.

Restored in 4K by Cinematheque Suisse and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the Ministerio de Cultura del Peru at the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory starting from the original 16mm camera negative and the sound preserved at Yacumama Films.