Black Butterfly

Peru, 2000. The young, idealistic teacher Gabriela (Melania Urbina) is on a class trip with her pupils when she receives the worst news of her life: her fiancé, Guido (Dario Abad), has been found killed in bed. Guido worked as a judge and fought corruption, an ill that had become increasingly more widespread during Alberto Fujimori’s political regime. Gabriela loses all her will to live and is on the verge of a breakdown. Her shock does not lessen when she is met by scandalous front page newspaper stories suggesting that Guido was killed by his gay lover.

She decides to call on the journalist to clear her dead fiancé. The former star reporter Angela (Magdyel Ugaz) does not care about anything any more and drowns her tabloid life in alcohol. She has been virtually pressured by her editor to write the story so as to put Guido in the worst possible light.

Confronted with Gabriela’s anger and vulnerability, Angela realises the position she has put herself in. Despite their differences, the two women find an inner desire to find the truth behind the killing, a truth that leads them into Peru’s innermost chambers of power. On her hunt for the truth Gabriela gets involved with Dotty, a woman dangerously close to the top of the corrupt, political hierarchy.

And it is precisely the chemistry between the protagonists that constitutes much of the driving force in Black Butterfly. Veteran director Fransisco J. Lombardi here returns with an at times unnerving and graphically unpleasant suspense film about dirty politics and a revenge that must be carried out at all costs.

Both Melania Urbina and Magdyel Ugaz have won awards for their performances, and Lombardi was nominated for the Grand Prix de Amériques during last year’s festival in Montreal.