Huaquero reconstructs the fragmented memories of ex-looters of pre-Hispanic artifacts, to reveal the tensions between ancestral knowledge, heritage crime and colonial wounds that persist in these lands.
Huaquero gently burrows into a shadow-line of ancestry and erasure. It listens to the voices of ex-huaqueros, once-seekers of sacred artifacts, whose memories drift between guilt, necessity and loss. Shot on 16 mm, the film’s grain carries the nostalgia of an archival age and whispers a decolonial promise, one that seeks empathy not from judgment, and reckoning not from indictment. The camera holds space for what remains: a community whose history was unearthing and unmaking at once, whose stories must now return, fragile and reclaimed.
