The Condor Daughter
La hija cóndor
Álvaro Olmos Torrico · Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay · 2025 · 109 min
FEATURES COMPETITION
Clara is a teenager living in a small indigenous community high in the Andes. Raised by her adoptive mother, a midwife, she’s learned to sing ancient songs believed to guide women through childbirth. But while she carries on this tradition, her heart is elsewhere: she dreams of leaving the mountains to become a folkloric music star in the big city.
Fiction · Drama, Coming-of-Age · 12+
Language: Spanish
Themes: Indigenous, tradition vs modernity
Screenplay: Álvaro Olmos Torrico
Producers: Álvaro Olmos Torrico, Cecilia Sueiro Mosquera, Diego Sarmiento Pagán, Federico Moreira, Iris Sigalit Ocampo Gil
Executive Producer: Sigalit Ocampo Gil, Aniceto Arroyo
Cinematographer: Nicolas Wong Díaz, Ccr
Key cast: María Magdalena Sanizo, Marisol Vallejos Montaño, Nelly Huayta
Director's Statement
During a journey through the mountains in the heart of the Bolivian Andes, I met a Quechua midwife. I was told she was the last one in the region, and that deeply caught my attention. For a while, I visited her regularly and learned to communicate with her, mainly through glances and expressions. Not long after, she passed away, and I came to understand the vital role traditional midwives play in the birth cycles of rural communities. Their presence is essential to passing down traditional and cultural Indigenous values, even those that may seem contradictory or timeless to us. The Condor Daughter was filmed in the same community where that midwife lived, among the same mountains and paths she used to walk. Writing this film has been an intense journey of research and reconnection with the land—it’s a story about time, about gazes, about sound and silence, about countryside and city, about life and death. — Álvaro Olmos Torrico
