[1] Born in La Paz, Bolivia, Jorge Sanjinés brings highly political films of a revolutionary aesthetic to peasant and working-class audiences in the Andean highlands.

This film is thought to have led to the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in an act of anti-imperialist cultural nationalism by the indigenous people.

[3] After showings of Yawar Mallku, Sanjinés learned that many peasants had criticism about the difficulty of his films due to the use of flashback for narration, as his film-making was greatly influenced by European art cinema, and about the lack of attention to denouncing the causes of the indigenous peoples' issues.

He took this into account when making his next film, called El coraje del pueblo (The Courage of the People), in 1971, about the Massacre of San Juan.

[6] Jorge Sanjinés worked under strained film-making conditions, with limited funding, few production facilities, and little Bolivian movie tradition to draw upon.

Although advocating the use of film, he makes note of the importance of being careful when using such a capitalist concept.We cannot attack the ideology of imperialism by using its own formal tricks and dishonest techniques, whose raison d'être is to stupefy and deceive.