Winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Utama frames climate change as a process of quiet devastation. Set in the arid Bolivian Altiplano, the film portrays an elderly Quechua couple, Virginio and Sisa (played by non-professional actors José Calcina and Luisa Quispe), who embody an ancestral bond to their land. We follow them through a relentless drought, which jeopardises their traditional way of life: raising llamas, presumably for wool production. While Utama scarcely depicts the processing of fibre, it emphasises the materiality of land and of traditional clothing face to face with environmental collapse and the erosion of cultural heritage. With stunning cinematography framing cracked earth and vast skies as both characters and potent metaphors for ecological fragility, Utama positions environmental harm not as a dramatic event but as a prolonged loss – of water, sustenance, and the tactile heritage embodied by indigenous crafts.
