for children aged 11+
The Island of the Sun in the middle of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia is a place that's as mystical as it is picturesque. Ten-year-old Lucía's family lives there with their beloved alpaca. When her father breaks their routine one morning and leaves for the city to make money, Lucía finds it difficult to cope with his absence.
After school, Lucía and her younger sister Maribel weave totora reeds into figurines that her mother sells to the numerous tourists. But the rhythm of life on the island and the passage of time cause her to rethink things. She realizes she must find her own path and that her father is no longer the person she longed to have back. The girl is thinking of going to the city herself, but she has no money. It's time she took her destiny into her own hands.
"This kind of migration from the countryside to the big city is a real issue in Bolivia, and I think in a lot of other parts of the world. The attention that is always given to this type of family breakdowns is focused on the adult who leaves and almost never on seeing how important this absence is and how it influences our ways of growing up. My intention was to bring a story belonging to a very specific and hermetic context and open it through an intimate story with which we can generate bridges of understanding between cultures in order to erase the differences that separate us." (Catalina Razzini)