



Pakatnamu, prémonition
2025
super-8 film, 4K digital scan, HD transfer, stereo sound
11’34”
Pakatnamu, premonition (2025), also shot on super-8, bears witness to an uncanny disruption of its recording. Filmed in 2015, during his first visit to the Pakatnamu archaeological site while scouting for the film El Brujo (2016), the footage shows the lunar, hallucinatory landscape of the archaeological site, strewn with bones and punctuated by the holes dug by huaqueros (grave diggers). Beltrame filmed the site a first time, but his camera kept jamming. Warned by the person accompanying him of the need to make an offering to the huaca (a word that designates both a site and a sacred object), Beltrame returned to the site and filmed again after making the offering, this time without any disturbance. Sequences scrambled by the jamming of the camera alternate with the later immaculate clips in the film’s montage, and in its final sequence, the camera seems to flee towards the sea. Pakatnamu, premonition is built around an occult presence made visible by its emanations. This presence is never named by Beltrame, who merely observes its effects, which he describes as a haunting. In the intertitles at the beginning of the film, Beltrame recounts the recording of the film, and also describes the circumstances and encounters that brought him back in 2022 to the same location in Pakatnamu to film La huaca llora (2024).