Peruvian Filmmaker Sami Hawka Explores Polyamory, Indigenous Rights and Resistance in ‘While Everything Falls’: ’Power Can Oppress People in Different Ways’

Oct 12, 2026 11:15am PT Peruvian Filmmaker Sami Hawka Explores Polyamory, Indigenous Rights and Resistance in ‘While Everything Falls’: ’Power Can Oppress People in Different Ways’

Selected for VIFF’s Business Hub Co-Productions Forum and the Queer Palm Lab, the film explores marginalized communities and political resistance under a fictionalized dictatorship

By Katherine Brodsky

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Katherine Brodsky

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Sami Hawka Courtesy of Sami Hawka

What happens when the right to love who you want becomes an act of resistance?

Peruvian filmmaker Sami Hawka is developing a feature, “While Everything Falls” (Afuera Todo Arde), which explores the fight for personal freedom under a fictionalized dictatorship in contemporary Peru.

The story takes place in a conservative rural community where two members of a polyamorous triad marry to keep up appearances. But when their relationship is exposed by their third lover, they flee to the capital, where they become involved in a rebellion against the dictatorship and discover that their fight for personal freedom is inseparable from the struggle for Indigenous rights, the rights of other marginalized communities and economic equality.

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