Best Bolivian movies

A love story situated in the Himalayas. A Buddhist monk can't choose between life and the way of the Buddha.

In the Bolivian altiplano, Virginio and Sisa, an elderly Quechua couple who have lived a quiet life for years, face an impossible dilemma during an unusually long drought: resist or be defeated by the hostile environment and the relentless passage of time.

Following his son Gabriel’s death, Jorge travels from conservative Bolivia to New York City to confront Gabriel’s boyfriend Sebastian. While the two battle over Jorge’s inability to accept his son, Sebastian channels his grief into a bold new play in honor of his lost love, in which Gabriel’s inner turmoil is transformed into an eye-popping gay fantasia.

Eleven Tibetans prostrate themselves every few steps during a 1,200-mile pilgrimage that lasts for seven months.

Sistu and her small community in the Andes discover the magic of cinema. This meeting causes a stir but also confronts them with their culture and highlights the limitations of the community to understand and read Spanish. As a solution, they choose Sistu so that every week he goes to town to see a movie and tells it to everyone in the square.

Tenzin Banjue, a young Tibetan monk living in the temple, takes a long way back home for the first time to visit his brother who is in a vegetative state from falling off the cliff. Despite finding himself enamored by his brother's fiancée, he refuses his mother's offer to stay and marry her, who at the same time gets a marriage proposal from another man. Struggling between faith to his religion and truth to his heart of love, Tenzin, together with his brother and fiancée, takes on a soul searching journey of five thousand kilometers.

During his last night on La Paz, a detective looking for a criminal visits four different zones of the city. On these zones, with their characters and situations, the detective faces enemies that represent the mythological plagues that struck the Uru nation, beasts defeated by the Condor. The detective sees himself as the Condor.

In La Paz -as opposed to many other cities- the rich live below, which is the Southern District. Life goes on without major mishaps in a large house surrounded by a beautiful garden. It is a wonderful world, a great bubble of comfort, where different personal spheres coexist: the mother, along with her three children and the Aymara inhabitants of the house. The drama surfaces slowly, without narrative ploys, observing day-to-day activities until internal and external forces make the bubble burst. The film relates the story of the final days of an upper-class family, at a time when the country is undergoing social changes.

In this Bolivian story, a man remembers his life while on a journey which will help him expiate his sins and which will result in his death. The focus on the story is on a man who has betrayed everyone he knows. He is planning to perform an ancient ritual dance which will end with his life being taken. He journeys from where he was living back to the village where most of the people he wronged still live. As he journeys, carrying his distinctive dance costume, his story is told in flashbacks. Once he gets there, he gets involved in the affairs of the villagers once more.

A community reacts against a group of foreigners who under the guise of development assistance are forcibly sterilizing the peasant women.

It’s the rainy season in the Tibetan highlands. It’s good for the crops, but bad for Wangdrak. He’s the only boy in his village who doesn’t own a pair of rain boots – and the other children tease him about it. His father has no money to buy any boots, plus he has other worries: there’s a dispute among the farmers. Secretly, his mother swaps a goat skin for a new pair of light blue boots. But when Wangdrak proudly wears them to school the next day, the children laugh at him again because it has stopped raining and the sun is shining. At least Wangdrak can count on his best friend Lhamo. Set in the vast mountains of Tibet this film affectionately portrays the story of a young boy’s dreams which are bound by the traditional structures of rural life.

Routine is the enemy of time. Jedidiah Jenkins rides his bicycle from Oregon to Patagonia, the southern tip of South America, while expounding upon ideas that made him leave a job he loved for the open road.

Die Geschichte von Michael, dem Ministranten aus S‚dtirol, der in Bolivien zu Comandante Miguel wird. Als angehender Priester will Michael noch friedlich gegen Armut kƒmpfen, f‚r die Verzweifelten, f‚r mehr soziale Gerechtigkeit. Doch mit 29 Jahren geht er in den Untergrund und entf‚hrt einen Industriellen. Bei der Befreiungsaktion erschiesst ihn die Polizei.

A young German/Bolivian Mennonite risks his life to escape his strict religious community to find love and freedom in the city.

An introvert city teenager is sent to his father's limber ranch. While trying to figure out his place as the son of the boss he finds himself in a world packed with naturalized violence.

Two extremely nerdy brothers are hell-bent on winning the laptop of their dreams, but in order to do so they must, in only 48 hours, get a kiss from two gorgeous girls who are completely out of their league.

While her husband is on his way to the market, a peasant woman is raped and murdered. Her widower carefully plans his revenge.

After being denied an American visa, a Bolivian professor becomes involved in a web of criminal activities, holds-up the American consulate and falls for a beautiful prostitute from the Bolivian lowlands.

José, a Bolivian retired general, is lying on his deathbed after a heart attack. Tormented by memories of his involvement in Operation Condor and invaded by deep remorse, he decides to tell his only son his biggest secrets in search of redemption.

Set in the 16th century, a peaceful Inca community is massacred by a group of conquistadors, and the survivors including Wara Wara flee into the mountains. Later, Wara Wara is assaulted by two Spanish soldiers, and rescued by a conquistador with a noble heart. The two fall in love, but are confronted with the mutual hatred between their peoples. Sentenced to death, they escape, and live happily ever after.

A documentary reenactment of the government-ordered massacre of striking tin miners and their families at the Siglo XX Mines in 1967 in Bolivia.

Elder Mamaní’s father has died, and it looks as if young Elder couldn’t care less, even though he has no one to take care of him now. He goes to live with his grandmother in the outskirts of the mining city, Huanuni, where Francisco, his godfather, gives him a job at the mine. But it doesn’t take long for Elder, who cares more about getting high and wandering through dangerous alleys at night, to mess it up. But he soon finds out about a dark secret regarding Francisco’s involvement in his father’s death…

Due to social unrest in the streets of La Paz (Bolivia), the owner of a modest beauty salon in a suburb of the city and her family, are forced to spend a few days together trapped inside with two clients. As the hours go by,petty fights between the five of them will make the coexistence in the confined space insufferable, turning the beauty salon into an unexpected battlefield.

A short story of a man who accidentally loses his cellphone and is found by a person that will not return it and is unaware of the damage he could cause.

Martín is a 13-year-old orphan shoeshine boy from La Paz, Bolivia, who has lived his entire life in the streets with the hope and desire to find his father. Driven by this desire and his imagination, Martin bonds with one of his best clients: Mr. Novoa, a lonely tailor whose only emotional bond is his dog, Astor, a fine German shepherd whom he cares for like a son.

Maria Francisca, a wealthy young heiress and her friend Mariana De Castro, a young protestant widow, are accused of witchcraft and taken before the Inquisition of Lima, Peru .

General Alfredo Ovando Candia was a decisive figure in 20 th century Bolivian history. Through old home movies and institutional footage, Mauricio Ovando goes in search of the figure (and the shadow) of his grandfather, interweaving his history and History while going after an uncomfortable truth.

A Bolivian by birth, who grew up with adoptive parents in the Swabian town of Mössingen, is looking for his family in the mountains of Potosí. Out of poverty, his mother gave the little boy away when he was just a few months old. The search carries a story that goes far beyond personal fate. Because Manuel was born in a region known for the ruthless exploitation of silver. It's a film about identity, homeland and equal opportunities.

An Aymara woman strugges against accusations that she is unfaithful to her husband.

Amid the lunar landscapes of the Bolivian mountains, the few traces of human presence seem minuscule, anecdotal. Shot by shot, Miguel Hilari’s camera follows these clues that lead to the city and its sonic confusion, where faces are captured with the same attention and poetry as the environment in which they live.

Sun Water Stone is an autobiographical movie about family fragmentation that resorts to different recording formats which formally intertwine, connect, merge and reconcile one with another.

On January 29, 1982, when the author of this story was one year eight months old, her brother Oswaldo died while doing military service. The military experts' verdict was: "accident due to a stray bullet". Since then, the family made a decision to confine his memory to oblivion. The documentary recounts this family's story, which is, at the same time, a facet of the country's history.

Genoveva, 16, lives in a small Bolivian shithole of a town in the 80´s. Her obsession is time. For how long it takes an ant to cross a leaf from one side to the other or the time it takes for a glass of water to fill. In the loneliness of her adolescent days, her adolescent hours, her adolescent minutes, Geno tries to survive the nuns at school, her hostile classmates, her hopeless parents, and men with guns.

A young Tibetan monk goes back home for the New Year's celebrations. Fascinated by television, he wants to bring his family's television to the monastery to show it to his master.

The story of an improbable friendship and a social comment on life in Bolivia in the eighties.

Based in the story by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Olalla" tells the story of a gothic and decadent family of genetic vampires who need human blood to survive, and where incest is the only way to maintain the family line.

Two cousins began to discover their sexuality together in adolescence and they reunite after ten years: he only recently returned to bachelorhood, and she returned from Buenos Aires, where she opted to specialize in Sexology.

Racial, social and cultural aspects of La Paz (called Chuquiago by the Aymaras) seen through four stories.

Eugenia, a young Bolivian middle-class woman, decides to separate from her husband, leave her job and move to her father's house in another city. She wants to start a different life. As time goes by she gets disappointed with her surrounding environment until one day she receives a notice that will put her long-awaited independence at risk.

A filmmaker and a Guarani Indian travel from La Paz to Bolivia’s swamps, exploring Guarani culture, ancient knowledge, and identity.

The story of a poor girl who leaves her starving family and sheep for a more prosperous village. Her grandfather finds her and tries to convince her to return to her home.

A taxi driver from La Paz, out of work and desperate for money, assumes the identity of a passenger — a photographer — and takes his next assignment, not knowing he is actually a hit-man whose next target is a top-ranked government official. He gets caught up in a terrorist operation where nobody is what they claim, including the source financing the assassination plot.

A vampire film with "altitude". Winner of 9 awards in 2013 from the Beverly Hills Outlook! The year is 1805, the city of Nuestra Señora de La Paz lives in fear of an invasion from the indigenous population, and - within its walls - a rebellion is brewing against the Spanish crown. If this were not enough, a beautiful vampire is terrorizing the population, leaving a bloodbath in her wake. A young Irish spy, on a mission for the rebels, is found near the body of a victim. She is captured, accused of the murders, publicly flogged and sentenced to die by garrote.

Shooting in Santiago de Okola, the rural Bolivian village where his father was born, Miguel Hilari notes how the place intimidated him as a child. In The Corral and the Wind Hilari focuses mostly on children and animals as he records the stark beauty of the highland landscape while suggesting undercurrents of struggle and toil. Whether recording schoolchildren from the village as they perform songs and poems of resistance or an encounter between his uncle and a neighbour joking about a dog, the distance and formality with which Hilari treats his subjects implies both an admiration for these people and a longing for a deeper connection with the culture of his Indigenous ancestors.

Bolivian drama that serves as a plea for tolerance of cultural diversity in that country.

An ex-convict returns home in search of a new life and a chance to reconnect with his estranged young daughter, only to be met with resistance from his father-in-law - an influential pastor in the Evangelical community in town.

Abraham Bojórquez - Ukamau Y Ké - developed hop hop in the Aymara language and with his rebellious lyrics, shook up Latin American society in the early 21st century. At the cusp of his musical career he died violently the same day he finished recording his second record. Years later, his friend, the rapper and documentarian, Andrés Ramírez returns to Bolivia to uncover the reasons for his death and to find him among the Andean circular temporality. In this surreal journey, Ukamau y Ké is revived through archival footage, testimonials and in dreams.

Lake Titicaca, 1984. Renowned La Paz engineer Morgan Cabrera drowns in a boating accident. An unfruitful search for his body comes to a halt when confirmation arrives from a faraway island. A task group sets off to retrieve the corpse

Carmen, an overweight woman who seeks to have her first orgasm, while dealing with a narcoleptic grandmother who presses her to lose weight and get married, and with a transsexual brother urged to have a sex change operation.

Portraits of three women who live and work in the infamous mines of El Cerro Rico in Bolivia. Work inside the mines has been limited to men, while the women are forced to work outside searching for mineral scraps on the side of the mountain. The film highlights the women's strength, determination and resilience in the face of struggle and hardship.

Cuestión de fe es un largometraje producido en Bolivia en 1995, dirigida por Marcos Loayza. En esta película participa Jorge Ortiz y Elías Serrano. La película trata de una imagen sagrada que debe ser trasladada por encargo desde una región altiplánica hacia el oriente del país. Pero durante el viaje, la virgen es robada en uno de los pueblos de las regiones andinas y llevado a la región de los Yungas, los protagonistas tratan de recuperar la imagen sagrada, pero al final, llegan a un acuerdo con los pobladores en los Yungas y la imagen se queda en un pueblo de dicha región.

Hidden in the interior of Bolivia, an old rent killer has just committed his latest murder. After months in isolation, he travels to the interior of Paraguay where he receives a large reward and thinks about meeting his daughter.

Amir and Amat are invited to a trip into the South American rain forest, but the pleasant visit to Bolivia quickly takes a bizarre turn as Amat starts having strange visions and loses his mind over the ghostly presence of a giant blood red ox. Amir must save his boyfriend from paranoia but he will quickly realize he can't trust nothing and nobody - as he might be losing his mind too.

Fifty years after the fall of his country, can the Dalai Lama make a breakthrough in his efforts to find a solution to the Tibet question?

Enigmatic and silent Gus arrives in a city in upstate New York, to a hotel where he is staying for a day, while developing meticulous grooming and cleaning routines and expect a phone call that can change your life.

A gangster has been tasked with taking out a woman he loves.

A handsome and mysterious stranger, played by Darío Grandinetti, walks into the town square of Villaserena one day and strategically places loudspeakers around the town, blaring a variety of musical tunes. Soon, he begins to sell airtime to the various locals, who broadcast their own personal love dedications and (more frequently) insults for all to hear. A subplot evolves between Abelardo (the stranger), Celeste (a young woman who is chained inside her father's house to stop her running away), and José (a young man).

In Bolivia, in a small mountain village, the daily rhythm seems marked by a time that no longer exists, by nature’s invisibles forces, by the will of the gods. In this place where there is no longer a difference between dreams and reality, during the festival of the dead, one can almost hear the voices of those who are no longer there, creating an invisible bridge between past and present.

With the high development of human civilization there is less and less pure land on the earth. The conflict between humans and nature keeps intensifying. Many primitive cultures and beliefs are gradually disappearing. "The Soul of Himalaya" is a story of the Lhoba people's legends and customs. The film portrays a warrior's journey to save an ancient tribe whose way of life is threatened.

A rural community in the Ecuadorian Andes suddenly faces a land dispute with the legal representatives of a large company. The discovery of very rich ore deposits in the territory is the reason of the offensive greedy on those places, where the community lived since immemorial times.

Official submission of Bolivia for the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category of the 68th Academy Awards in 1996. A schoolteacher in the small city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra has a passionate affair with his frigid wife's sister--despite the risk of having to confront not only his wife, but also his dubious father-in-law. Photographer Jonas (Dino García) and teenager Julia (María Renée Prudencio) live the romance loaded with erotic adventure in the dark and wet basement of the old house where he installs his laboratory of development. She is the sister of Talía (Claudia Lobo)- his wife and both are daughters of a coffin maker who dreams of pharaonic tombs. The film shows the rise of drug trafficking, illegal trade in which Julia's family is involved, the same that ends up marrying Grigotá (Milton Cortez) the son of a powerful narco.

An alligator hunter falls in love with a teacher who has arrived from the west. Rurrenabaque, the town where the story takes place, is at a crossroads between collaborating in the installation of a drinking water system or continuing the tradition of "drinking water from the river." Ruiz uses a historical event to tell a love story (combining his skills as a documentary filmmaker).

After several years a student returns to his native village only to find that despite the agrarian reform act of 1952, nothing has changed in the treatment of peasants, and racial discrimination continues.