Papa (The Original Potato Eaters)

Overview

Potatoes, indigenous to the farmlands of Andean Peru serve as the principle metaphor in this revisionist documentary. Papa replicates Vincent Van Gogh’s original composition, The Potato Eaters. The “uncivilised, unpeeled dusty faces” of the original Dutch peasants are portrayed by an indigenous Andean Quechua family who continue to this day “to earn their meals honestly.” Following the model of Luis Buñuel’s landmark 1932 surrealist documentary, Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes), Papa attempts to parody the discourse typically adopted by the ‘voice of god’ documentary form, simply by bringing the underlying elitism of such formalism to the foreground – the distance that is inherent to ‘objectivity’ is revealed merely as cynicism.