Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles

Having languished in a closet for more than thirty years, this newly rediscovered documentary is a unique record of a bold and troubling experiment in criminal justice. A collaboration between between Walter Saxer, the producer of Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO, and the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, SEPA: OUR LORD OF MIRACLES observes an open-air penal colony of the same name, created in 1951 by the Peruvian government in the Amazon jungle. Tasked with growing crops on these colonized lands, the inmates were permitted to roam freely, commune with their families, and dance and cook together, yet they soon found themselves in despair, abandoned and forgotten by their country and the world at large, forming, in the words of Herzog, “a bizarre island of freedom where tragedy and absurdity create a closed-in world seemingly invented from feverish dreams.”