TEKI MASI / En la huella de la papa andina
2014 · 22m · Argentina
Directed by Santiago Lofeudo
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Many of the inhabitants of the hills of Quebrada del Toro have to migrate to the outskirt settlements of the City of Salta with the expectation of progress they cannot achieve in their place of origin. Chinguila and Manolo are members of a cooperative that seeks to promote a product demanded in the haute cuisine of large cities: thanks to the Andean potato, they can choose to live in the hills.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a feel-good doc about artisanal potato farming that could've been a tourism board PSA, but Lofeudo refuses the easy uplift—the migration pressure and economic desperation stay in the frame, making this quietly subversive about what 'progress' actually means in rural Latin America.
A formally restrained portrait that situates itself in the ethnographic documentary tradition while maintaining an almost elegiac tenderness; the editing resists narrative convenience, letting the landscape and labor speak with the weight of considered observation.
The film's engine is a single choice: to shoot the cooperative's work not as triumphalist salvation but as everyday dignity, and it's that refusal to sentimentalize—paired with the unhurried pacing—that transforms what could be a development-economics story into something achingly specific about place and persistence.