When the renowned Peruvian anthropologist died in May 2011 Carlos Ivan Degregori, something inside his younger brother, the filmmaker Felipe Degregori, broke irreversibly. “Since that day I have not been able to feel anything. I have not been able to cry”, Felipe recounted in the documentary “We are all stars” (2017), which portrayed the slow descent of the film director towards the abysses of depression.
“Felipe was a person full of chiaroscuro, gray areas,” he tells Trade Patricia Wiesse, who directed the documentary that had Degregori as the protagonist. On one hand he was naturally kind-hearted, sweet, but He also had a very self-destructive side.”. This complex personality led the filmmaker to abandon almost all contact with the world: he first isolated himself in a small room in Rímac, far from his family; he then went through welfare nursing homes; he woke up one day in a hospital bed, not knowing how he got there.
And the outcome of that tragic spiral took place yesterday morning, Friday, when he was found lifeless in the room where he lived alonein Villa Maria del Triunfo. Apparently he had been dead for several days.without anyone noticing the fact.
“In a scene in the documentary, he even tells me that if he died, it would probably be two or three days and no one would notice. Somehow, he already knew where life was leading him.”, explains Wiesse Risso. “That’s why his death makes me very sad, but in a way it doesn’t surprise me.”
SLOW TURN OFF
Degregori Caso was born in 1954 and did audiovisual studies in Moscow in the 1970s. His first feature film, “Abisa a los compañeros” (1980) recounts the plans of a group of foreign guerrillas seeking to support an uprising in Cusco. The film was praised for its frenetic and well-paced action scenes, which bespoke a highly skilled filmmaker.
His career, however, was sporadic. It was only in 1993 that he managed to release his best film, a comedy: “We are all stars”., which told the story of a low-income family on the adventure of participating in a television game show. “That is a film for which I even have personal affection”, affirms the film critic Leny Fernández. “I really like the very realistic and close way in which Degregori portrays a portion of Peruvian society with which many of us might identify. And it does it without caricaturing povertysomething that many comedies tend to do ”.
Paradoxically, Degregori gambled too much with said film. As he himself confessed, he invested a large part of his savings in the film, which unfortunately did not do well at the box office. That was the first blow in an increasingly irregular career – personal and professional. In 2000 she released another fiction feature, “Ciudad de M”, much less successful than his previous productions; and later he filmed some documentaries such as “Peces de ciudad” (2007) or “Translatina” (2010).
What came next is already told. But it is still frustrating that Degregori’s indisputable talent has been lost due to a host of factors, including the indolence of a State that usually turns its back on its creators. “His depression of him was also caused by the ingratitude of a country that does not protect its artists,” adds Leny Fernández. It is one more case of the tragedy of Peru, where marvelous minds disappear due to abandonment”. I hope he finally rests in peace.
