AXOMAMA follows the life of Alberto and his relatives, a family of potato custodians in the Andes. The film weaves a poetic parallel between the potato’s journey and the narrator’s complex tracing of her own origins. From being a sacred gift to being one of the world’s most ubiquitous foods, the humble potato emerges as both metaphor and mirror of resistance in the face of survived displacement, as the narrator grapples with questions of identity and belonging.
Written and Directed by Tracy Valcárcel
Produced by Tracy Valcárcel and Vjosana Shkurti
Picture Editor / Filmmaking Mentor: Vjosana Shkurti
Cinematography / Camera: Tracy Valcárcel, Natalia Mont
Sound recordist: Irazema Vera
Music: Paloma Daris, Tracy Valcárcel
Sound design: Paloma Daris, Bruno Bélanger
Genre Documentary
Country Peru, Canada
Year 2025
Length 27 min
CAST
Paula Mantupa
Juan Mamani
Alberto Quispe
Flavio Quispe
Simeon Quispe
Juliana Quispe
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
2026 LimaDocs Festival Official Competition
2026 Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma
2026 Filministes Festival Programme “Cultiver autrement” **BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY
2025 29th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
DISTRIBUTION
Skye Callow / Winnipeg Film Group
distribution@winnipegfilmgroup.com
SUPPORTED BY
Canada Council for the Arts
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec
PRIM Centre for Artists
MAINFILM
"With Axomama, filmmaker Tracy Valcárcel explores the rugged paths of the Peruvian Andes, her homeland and also the birthplace of the potato, which originated 8,000 years ago on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Along the way, the director delves into the history of this miraculous stalk. A journey to the land of ancestors—her own, and those of the potato. Common ancestors, in fact, if we are to believe the local legends that consider the vegetable's seeds to be the mother of the Andean indigenous peoples, so intertwined is the potato's destiny with that of the humans who have cultivated it for millennia.
Though the film is less than half an hour long, it is so splendid, so rich, that one could write pages about it. From the opening scene, one immediately understands that one has entered a precious work. In the night of a small town shrouded in twilight, the glow of streetlights, buildings, car headlights, and street food stalls creates a luminous, cocoon-like atmosphere where color, laughter, and life exist, flourishing in a chiaroscuro worthy of Caravaggio. Through a narrative as intimate as it is inquisitive, the filmmaker asserts that few migrations have been more fruitful than that of the potato, and this has been true throughout history. Spread by guanacos (ancestors of llamas), the genes of wild potatoes were transformed by frost and cold into chuño, the first edible form of the potato, which was then adopted by the indigenous populations of the region. A kind of migration in itself, at once genetic, biological, geographical and historical, before the journey that will take her, against her will, all over the planet to feed the whole world.
Images, narration, and the comments of the people encountered seem to coexist in a symbiosis rarely seen in cinema. The incredible beauty of the scenes, the photography, the colors, but also the exceptional precision of the choice of objects and places depicted, the camera angles, and the composition are breathtaking. There is absolutely nothing superfluous in the meticulous editing, which recounts the daily lives of contemporary farmers against a backdrop of voice-over narration describing the evolution of potato cultivation, from the original indigenous populations to the haciendas of the colonizers, to the ancestral lands reclaimed today, by way of the tuber's place in local mythology. Throughout this voice-over narrative, the carefully chosen shots are designed to clearly show: the gesture (of planting with traditional tools, of harvesting); the location of the crops (on the hillsides, against the prodigious profile of the Andean peaks cascading like waves toward the horizon); bodies bent over to pick up potatoes (those of women carrying children on their backs); the calloused hands of the farmers (hands inherited from generations of farm workers).
Ultimately, despite the obvious fascination with all the fabulously colorful aspects of this community (from purple potatoes to pink pom-pom hats), the film avoids an overly ethnographic approach. By literally recognizing herself in the potato and its migratory journey, by identifying with it in its "we" narration, as if her own origins sprang from the same rhizomes, the filmmaker creates a close link between herself, the potato, and their respective histories. Although her distance inspires both regret and a desire for reconnection, Tracy Valcárcel is also part of the myth—and the potato goddess, Axomama, watches over her."
(translated from French)
- Claire Valade, Panorama Cinema 2026
Vjosana Shkurti 