A filmmaker loses his mind making a wrestling doc while Peru falls apart around him.
A young man from Lima faces anxiety and depression in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic while trying to carry out the most ambitious project of his life: an experimental documentary in the style of the French New Wave about Peruvian wrestling, in which which will condense more than a thousand hours of footage that he has been recording for 4 years. The political and health crises that the country is going through, the confinement and the ghosts typical of someone who suffers from emotional problems will make this work more difficult. So he will cling to the enormous passion he has for cinema and for this beautiful sport that has fascinated him since he was a child.
Direction
Kawashita weaponizes his own breakdown as narrative device.
Editing
1000 hours distilled into one anxious, intimate hour.
Production
Shot entirely in lockdown apartments with zero budget.
Director
Sebastián Kawashita
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Cachascán is Peru's working-class answer to Mexican lucha libre, historically mocked as 'fake' wrestling—Sebastian's reclamation of it mirrors his own validation-seeking.
The thousand hours of footage were genuinely shot over four years; the 'failed' documentary Sebastian describes in-film is, in reality, this film's own origin story.
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