HAPPY DECEMBER! So fast it’s the time of the year again where festive bells are ringing and the smell of Christmas is in the air.

Yesterday, I watched a second Spanish film as part of the Latin American Film Festival in Singapore. This was much better than the one that I watched the previous day and it was a film from Peru.
It gave me insights about how Peruvian youngsters grew up in Lima, the capital, during a period of military unrest and how a sweet story of a young couple developed. We take our freedom and peace here for granted, yet there are many youth out there in the world living in wartorn areas, such as Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Ukraine etc. They are robbed of their childhood and the chance to continue their education. Nevertheless, the youth in these countries still know how to enjoy and make full use of their natural circumstances.
I found out that Timbuktu has two meanings, one is the name of a city in Mali, Western Africa and the other to signify a faraway, distant place, aka ‘ulu’ in local slang. Yes, we all dream of going to somewhere faraway to escape from life and mundaneness, but we do not notice how lucky we are in terms of mobility. We should learn to treasure our loved ones and not just looking to traveling overseas as a form of escapism.

Synopsis
Ana and Lucho are two teenagers who live in Peru. Their story of love, which starts in childhood, reveals the changes which took place in this country during the 80’s.
For them, the only way to survive in the middle of violence and lack of opportunities is through their love, a sort of refuge which has as its homeland an imaginary country called Timbuktu. Nevertheless, the reality will stand in their way and collapse their Utopia.