This article appeared in the January 17, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Photo from the 1983 Bolivian Miners’ Film Workshop. Courtesy of Ateliers Varan.

Klaus Barbie, the Nazi commander notoriously known as “The Butcher of Lyon,” spent decades in Bolivia under the alias Klaus Altmann. Having fled to the South American country in 1951, he managed to evade justice for many years thanks to the complexities of Cold War geopolitics and Bolivia’s shifting regimes. But in 1983, after protracted negotiations between France and Bolivia, Barbie’s time ran out. The newly elected democratic government of Hernán Siles Zuazo extradited Barbie to France, where he finally faced consequences for his crimes.

The deal came with a twist: in exchange for Barbie’s handover, France agreed to fund several civic initiatives for the Bolivian government. Among these was the Miners’ Film Workshop, an ambitious project conceived by the Bolivian Mining Union (FSTMB) and COMIBOL, the state mining company, in collaboration with France’s Ateliers Varan, a direct-cinema workshop co-founded by groundbreaking filmmaker and Nouvelle Vague associate Jean Rouch. In essence, Barbie’s extradition led to the unlikely genesis of a direct-cinema experiment in the Andes—one in which 8mm cameras were given to the adult and teenage children of miners, so they could make short films documenting day-to-day life in their town.

The program involved a three-month course led by two French instructors from Ateliers Varan and two Bolivian filmmakers, María Luisa Mercado and Gabriela Ávila. The 15 participants, who were in their late teens and early 20s, were tasked with creating films about their lives in Telamayu, a mining town in the southern region of Potosí. In total, the group produced 13 short films that captured their world—“The reality of how we are,” as a participant explains to his subject in one of the shorts—with striking immediacy, reflecting the workshop’s utopian ideals and the FSTMB’s goal of artistic self-representation.

The workshop was conceived as a pilot program, the first step in what was to be an enduring initiative fully self-managed and sustained within Bolivia, complete with a “cinemateca” to preserve and showcase the films. Yet, after the initial workshop, the remaining film stock was sent back to France, and the films seemingly vanished from public view. In recent years, three academics—Isabel Seguí (University of St. Andrews), Miguel Hilari (UMSA in La Paz), and Miguel Errazu (EQZE, i.e., Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola, in San Sebastián)—took up the task of tracking down the films. Now the researchers are in the process of digitizing this archive, creating a website with information about the workshop, and preparing for the next stage: the dissemination of the films via festivals and museums. The final phase of their work will be to “activate” the archive in Bolivia. “The idea is to start a memory-making process with the producers’ own communities and their descendants as well,” Seguí said in a Zoom interview.

Before the Miners’ Workshop, Ateliers Varan organized a similar program in Mozambique in 1978, a few years after the country’s liberation from Portuguese colonial rule. That collaboration set the tone for the group’s projects and its aim of grassroots empowerment. With funding from the French state, Ateliers Varan aimed to teach young filmmakers in places far removed from mainstream cultural hubs how to wield the tools of direct cinema. Rouch’s hybrid filmmaking practice shaped the ethos of the workshops, which experimented in cinéma vérité and observational storytelling while also creating spaces for the participants’ self-representation. Joining him in this effort was Jacques d’Arthuys, a French-Bolivian filmmaker who oversaw operations.

The contract between the FSTMB, COMIBOL, and Ateliers Varan shows how the vision of the Varan direct-cinema project aligned with the populist ideas of the Bolivian labor union. The document begins with a list of desired objectives, including “The demystification of the technological, economic, and artistic aspects of film production [in order] to return cinema to the people as a means of expression and communication,” and “To break with the distortion imposed on the image of the Bolivian people by the so-called specialists, with the aim of enabling the recovery of their own authentic image.”

To understand why these mining unions took on such wide-ranging cultural projects, one needs to understand the central role of mining in Bolivia’s economy and national identity. The Andes have been a repository of immense wealth in the form of silver and tin deposits since colonial times. The Cerro Rico mountain in Potosí produced 80 percent of the world’s silver between the 16th and 18th centuries, and became a key source for European currency mints. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, tin had replaced silver as the region’s most sought-after resource and primary export. In the 1940s, during a time of political upheaval in Bolivia, several mining unions—including the influential FSTMB–emerged to consolidate workers’ power. The unions played a pivotal role in the socialist revolution of 1952, which saw the nationalization of several key mines in the country and the establishment of COMIBOL, the state-owned mining corporation. In this context, the miner emerged as a potent symbol of labor and social justice.

The Miners’ Workshop was not the first artistic initiative of the FSTMB and COMIBOL—it was part of a rich lineage of cultural projects spearheaded by Líber Forti, an Argentine-Bolivian activist famous for his experimental theater work, who was the union’s secretary of culture from 1962 until 1986. The Miners’ Workshop was announced at the FSTMB’s Third Cultural Conference, which brought together FSTMB and COMIBOL leaders to discuss and develop cultural initiatives related to the miners. The first conference, held in 1963, focused on literacy programs. The second, held in 1979, also focused on education. At the third, the Miners’ Film Workshop was announced, along with “radio mineras” (radio programs for miners by miners) and a university for mine workers called La Universidad Nacional “Siglo XX.”

The films that emerged from this workshop capture a way of life that changed radically just two years after they were made. Forti’s work, and the work of the union in general, was constantly under threat in an atmosphere of political instability. The union was even outlawed periodically during the ’70s and early ’80s, and union leaders were jailed and tortured. In 1985, the world tin market crashed, and, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Bolivian government moved to privatize tin mining. Between 1985 and 1986, COMIBOL’s labor force was reduced by more than two-thirds, leading to a sharp decline in the FSTMB’s power and influence. By the 1990s, natural gas had replaced tin as the country’s primary export. This gutting of an integral part of the Bolivian economy gave rise to massive unemployment, social unrest, and the rise of the parallel economy of the cocaleros, or growers of coca—the plant that provides the main raw ingredient for the production of cocaine.

For Seguí and Errazu—academics specializing in 8mm and 16mm cinema and alternative film histories of Latin America—the films of the Bolivian Miners’ Workshop were long shrouded in mystery. Their project began with what Seguí calls “counter-extraction”: locating the original materials at the Varan Institute in Paris and cataloguing the films, along with their paper trail. This initial phase has been followed by efforts to digitize the 13-film collection, undertaken by students and collaborators at EQZE. Their work isn’t just about preserving an archive—it’s also about grappling with and articulating the processes and philosophies that shaped the workshop. Seguí and her colleagues believe that the films add a crucial perspective to the history of Bolivian cinema, which until now has been dominated by filmmakers from bourgeois classes.

A key document unearthed by the professors is an academic thesis written by Mercado, one of the Bolivian filmmakers who was hired by the FSTMB to work alongside the French instructors. Mercado recounts the workshop’s progression: after five weeks of filmmaking instruction and screenings of Dziga Vertov’s films and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), participants began researching and developing their own projects. Topics were proposed and debated within the group; in some instances, cultural secretaries from the mining union collaborated on drafting scripts that reflected workers’ suggestions. “After the shoot, [the participants] share their experience with their peers, discussing the technical conditions and the challenges of the production,” Mercado writes. Some of the films were shot inside the mines, where temperatures could range from sub-zero to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, accompanied by unrelenting humidity.

Mercado also describes how the editing process revealed the workshop’s dependence on French resources. While participants outlined their desired cuts, many of the shorts were completed in France due to the lack of a functional film lab in Bolivia. “Workers’ cinema positions labor unions as the foundational structures for its creation. In the FSTMB Film Workshop, this aspect was partially fulfilled,” Mercado writes. French involvement was critical, providing both equipment and expertise, Mercado argues, but she expresses hope that the workshop might one day evolve into a “self-managed” endeavor, free from external dependency.

Three of the short films are now available to view on the Ateliers Varan website. (I was granted private access to the rest of the archive, which is not yet public.) Ranging from ten to 30 minutes and shot on 8mm with synchronous sound, the films share recurring elements: single-subject portraits, everyday scenes of Telamayu, and the rhythms of miners and their wives at work and home, captured with the unsteady intimacy of handheld cameras. Though these efforts were intended as artifacts of self-reflection, it is notable that the filmmakers were not miners themselves—though some would later take up the trade.

This meant that many of the films paid special attention to the labor on the periphery of the mines. While the phrase “miner’s cinema” might evoke images of heroic figures laboring deep within the earth, the filmmakers shift focus to the practical rhythms of life in a mining town, including above ground: what people eat, how they speak, and the unrelenting repetition of their work. To Be a Miner’s Wife and to Wait by Victor Poeta and All Saints’ Day by Willy Mamani both focus on the lives of miners’ spouses, highlighting their economic difficulties and domestic realities. Other works, like On the Back of the Sleeping Elephant by Alfred Siles and Doña Helena Palliri by César Alarcón, focus on palliris—women who sift through waste collected in the mines, separating valuable minerals from dust. In an early scene from Doña Helena Palliri, we see the titular Doña Helena bent over on top of a mountain, surrounded by shards of rock and pebbles, scraping piles of stones against a sheet of perforated metal to isolate the minerals from the dirt. In the background, indigo mountains emphasize the altitude and the starkness of the landscape.

In Llacquiy Huata by Magdaleno Nina, the line between subject and filmmaker is blurred. The documentary begins as a portrait of a crotchety old farmer named Don Valentin, but his direct-to-camera monologues about the difficulties of his existence morph suddenly into a confrontational mode when he turns to the lens and angrily demands to be paid for his participation in the film. Perhaps most distinctive is Carreras, which Hilari says the group decided to make as a collective on the spur of the moment. This remarkable film documents a Soap Box Derby race through the mountains surrounding Telamayu. Dynamic editing and playful camerawork capture the energy of the drivers and the unpredictability of the race, as cars often veer off course in clouds of dust. During our conversation, Hilari noted that viewers in Europe have marveled at the idea that these films were made by individuals seemingly untouched by the modern world—a misconception he challenges. He explained that these communities were far from isolated, with many large mining centers housing their own cinemas, and miners sometimes receiving movie-ticket vouchers as part of their wages.

The films offer an invaluable snapshot of everyday life in Bolivian mining communities, recording intimate details that might otherwise be lost. More broadly, these films represent a unique and fleeting moment in Bolivian film history, in which the interests of organized labor and those of the government aligned to provide the technologies of European art-house cinema to a working-class community. Far from serving as propaganda, the workshop’s shorts are unfiltered documents of (and commentaries on) the workers’ daily lives, embodying the union’s vision of art as a tool for unity and longevity. The pamphlet for the FSTMB’s Third Cultural Conference concludes with the following message: “The Third Cultural Conference has not finished, because in the embers of these flames of militant fervor that illuminated all of us who participated in this Conference, our human, tender brotherhood will remain, and we will continue to be united by the desire for a culture that—in the face of a destiny of misery, suffering, and uncertainties—affirms us as resolute and determined, fighting on together for a dawn of social happiness for our children—one that we ourselves may never see.”

All Spanish-language texts quoted were translated by the author.

Lucia Ahrensdorf is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Foreign Policy, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Screen Slate, and The Film Stage.