Watch The Stranger-Than-Fiction Trailer for ‘Song Without A Name'

Pamela Mendoza in *Song Without A Name*. Courtesy of Film Movement

Song Without A Name by Melina Leon — Pamela Mendoza in *Song Without A Name*. Courtesy of Film Movement

Melina Leon’s award-winning debut feature Song Without A Name about deep corruption in 1980’s Peru will premiere on film movement August 7^th and in participating theaters around the country.

Based on harrowing true events, Song Without A Name tells the story of Georgina, an indigenous Andean woman whose newborn baby is whisked away moments after its birth in a downtown Lima clinic – and never returned. Stonewalled by a byzantine and indifferent legal system, Georgina approaches journalist Pedro Campas, who uncovers a web of fake clinics and abductions – suggesting a rotting corruption deep within Peruvian society. Set in 1988, in a Peru wracked by political violence and turmoil, Melina León’s heart-wrenching first feature renders Georgina’s story in gorgeous, shadowy black-and-white cinematography, “styled like the most beautiful of bad dreams” (Variety). Song Without A Name is a “Kafkaesque thriller” (The Hollywood Reporter) that unflinchingly depicts real-life, stranger-than-fiction tragedies with poetic beauty.

A 2019 Cannes Camera d’Or nominee, Song Without A Name, and winner of more than 30 international awards including “Best Film” at the Lima Latin American Film Festival and “Best Film by an Emerging Director” at the Munich Film Festival, the Latin American period-piece has garnered raves around the world. Guy Lodge of Variety wrote that the film “prompted surface-level comparisons to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma…but León’s far more modestly scaled Latin American period piece is entirely its own film, meshing vérité-style technique with passages of dark, folkloric reverie, as its characters’ investigation of a single kidnapping spirals into a heady vortex of institutional corruption. León’s world-building remains mesmerizing, steeped as it is in local lore, rituals, and haunting traditional music.” Wendy Ide of Screen Daily also notes there are similarities to Roma” which go beyond the striking black and white photography. Both films deal with social hierarchies in Latin American countries that divide the population along racial lines; both feature wrenching depictions of interrupted motherhood. “