Madeinusa Don Caayo Analysis

In a scene from the 2006 Peruvian film Madeinusa, Don Cayo—mayor of the fictional Andean town of Manayaycuna, breaks a clay pot full of food on the ground, as a gesture that signals the beginning of tiempo santo. As they file out of church after mass, the people of the town prepare to celebrate a period that starts at 3pm on Good Friday—the time of Jesus’ crucifixion—and ends at 6am on Easter Sunday, the time of his resurrection. According to local custom, during this period there is no sin: since God is dead he cannot judge the actions of his people. At church, the residents have participated in a ritual in which the statue of Christ has been taken down, placed in a glass coffin and blindfolded to symbolize God’s inability to see what happens …show more content…
Madeinusa’s mother is said to have fled to Lima at some point in the past for unknown reasons. During tiempo santo people, in the temporary absence of supreme oversight, give in to excesses of all kinds, some are harmless enough like eating and dancing while others are darker and more sordid in nature, like the sexual abuse that Madeinusa suffers at her father’s hands. Incest is not only presented as one more of those excesses or as a signifier for the barbaric character of a society left to its own devices. Rather, as I will argue, incest here is used to recall the state of anomie that became accepted as commonplace throughout the duration of the internal armed conflict. But Madeinusa is hardly alone in this: Josué Méndez’s 2008 release Dioses (Gods) is a satire in which Diego, the youngest child of an upper crust Lima family, feels attracted to his older sister, Andrea. Additionally, in his previous film, Días de Santiago (Days of Santiago), Méndez had already explored incest although much less prominently than in Dioses: the father of Santiago, the main character, in the end is revealed to be sexually abusive toward his youngest