Sami Hawka's 'While Everything Falls' Targets Vancouver, Cannes Labs

By Elena Vasquez

Peruvian filmmaker Sami Hawka's feature project "While Everything Falls" (Afuera Todo Arde) has been selected for two international development programs: the Vancouver International Film Festival's Business Hub Co-Productions Forum and the Queer Palm Lab, the LGBTQ-focused initiative linked to the Cannes Film Festival.

The Madrid-based director is now pursuing international co-production partners and funding. FILMA+, a Peruvian production company, is developing the film as an international co-production. Casting remains open. Hawka says discussions with potential producers are underway.

After a stalled development period, the director reports sharp progress. "The project has taken a giant leap," Hawka tells Variety.

What is the film about?

"While Everything Falls" is set in a fictionalized contemporary dictatorship in Peru. The story opens in a conservative rural community. Two members of a polyamorous triad marry to keep up appearances. When their third lover exposes the relationship, they flee to the capital and join a rebellion against the regime.

There, the characters discover that their fight for personal freedom connects to broader struggles: Indigenous rights, other marginalized communities and economic equality.

"The film follows these characters who are in their bubble," Hawka tells Variety. "But when they break [out of] the bubble, they start realizing that they have other forms of oppression" beyond queerness and polyamory.

The rebellion includes Indigenous movements demanding recognition. "In this rebellion, there are also a lot of Indigenous people and Indigenous movements that need vindication of their rights," Hawka says.

How does colonial history shape the story?

Hawka connects the fictional dictatorship to Peru's colonial past and its continuing consequences. "When we as a culture experienced that…It had a very strong impact on our culture and on the lives that we had here," they say.

Peru, in Hawka's view, remains fractured. "These people still need some sort of citizenship in this new order that's not organized to fit their needs, or was built on inequality."

The story draws on Hawka's own life. Hawka is nonbinary and has Indigenous roots. They spent a significant part of their childhood in Cusco, in Peru's Andean highlands, attending an intercultural school where they learned Quechua and built ties with Indigenous elders and spiritual traditions.

"I think it has helped me situate a place that needs vindication," Hawka says of that upbringing. "It has helped me look at things from a perspective where rights need to get acknowledged, and where political action needs to start."

The director also points to pre-colonial gender diversity. "There are documents of many places in the world where societies had more than two genders, and that was sort of erased, and now we are starting to reconnect with that," they say.

In Peru, Hawka cites archaeological ceramics depicting same-sex encounters by shamans in sacred ritual contexts. "Now it's kind of our work to go back and try to rescue all these things."

What will the film look like?

Hawka plans a visual contrast between two worlds. The countryside scenes will be contemplative and quiet, shot in natural light with a documentary-like approach. The city sequences will carry noise, intense colors and chaos. The goal, the director says, is to show "places and spaces inhabited the way they actually are."

The theme binding it together is authoritarian control over private life. "Power can invisibilize and oppress people in different ways — around class, around gender, around race, around economic privilege," Hawka says.

The characters' arc leads from isolation to solidarity. "They realize that they need to join the resistance in order to be free themselves too," says Hawka. "It's like a collective thing."

Social punishment, the director notes, is also an "exercise of power" — whether the rules concern polyamory or homosexuality.

With two festival-linked labs behind it and producers circling, "While Everything Falls" now moves toward financing as one of the few Peruvian features framing queer love and Indigenous rights as a single political struggle.