Director: Mikael Wiström
Perú/Sweden
2004
90 minutes
Release Date: 2006
In Spanish with English subtitles

In 1974, the Swedish photographer and journalist Mikael Wiström traveled across Perú chronicling the lives of people who literally had nothing and were forced to live off what they could find in rubbish dumps. There, Wiström met Daniel Barrientos, a young man stricken with polio. Daniel asks Mikael what a man his age is doing with such an expensive camera. From that moment, a complicated friendship, lasting over 30 years, develops between these two men. Following Wiström’s 1991 documentary The Other Shore, which chronicled Daniel’s family’s continual struggle to create a decent life for themselves, Wiström returns once more to Perú in 2003 in hopes of coming to terms with both his responsibility and Daniel’s plight.

In Compadre, Wiström documents the daily life of Daniel’s family and also involves the viewer in the great dilemma of the Western filmmaker being confronted with dire poverty, an existential inequality that puts great pressure on the friendship. Wiström may call Daniel his brother, but how far does his “fraternal” responsibility extend?