She looks at her sons in anger, thinking they’ll grow like their fathers, ‘that they’ll also rape’

Daniel Nelson

Thousands of civilians around the world are caught in the crosshairs between army and rebels, with one set of armed men raping, pillaging and burning before abandoning the territory to the next bunch of brigands.

Soldier’s Woman slowly, gently, quietly tells the story of one such victim: a Peruvian raped by a soldier during the fight against the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas in the 1980s.

Now middle-aged, Magda Surichaqui Cóndor was an innocent girl when she was assaulted, and subsequently repeatedly raped by the same man because she was afraid to resist.

The consequence was a baby and ostracism – from many in the community as well as from her family. (“When my uncles visited, they reproached me: ‘You allowed them to do it. It’s all your fault.’“ Even her mother blamed her. In the village, during filming, a man says, “They weren’t raped. They meddled [the word used in the subtitles] with the troops.”)

Women in Magda’s situation are belittled as “soldiers’ bitches”, whores, “soldiers’ leftovers”. It’s grim, and there’s more antagonism – based on envy – when Magda claims compensation from a tribunal.  

The film is like a moving tableau, as she goes about her chores or stares impassively at fellow villagers struggling to eke out hardscrabble lives. The basics of her story as a soldier’s woman are filled in by occasional voiceovers from the trial.

Relief comes with three women who visit the bare home to which she has moved in order to get away from the whisperers. They tell their tales, reminisce about their childhoods (all say how scared they were of their mothers), laugh, throw a top, peel wormy potatoes, spin wool, chew coca leaves (“What would we do without coca?”). Devastatingly, one says she looks at her sons in anger, thinking they’ll grow like their fathers, “that they’ll also rape … I resent men.”

Most casualties of conflict are civilians not soldiers, women and children, not men. It’s heartbreaking.

* Soldier’s Woman (Mujer de Soldado) is showing on 13 August, 6.20pm, at the Curzon Bloomsbury