'Ovejas y Lobos' and the Mothers Who Never Stopped Searching

Director Alex Fischman Cárdenas’s latest short film, ‘Ovejas y Lobos’ (Sheep and Wolves), follows a mother embarking on a search after her son vanishes without a trace. The film unfolds in Quechua at the height of Peru’s armed conflict.

When I speak with Alex, the thing that comes up most regularly is empathy. It’s the mindset he entered the project with, one maintained in every frame, and something international audiences felt acutely following the premiere.

But empathy would also become a means of personal reckoning. “As I edited the film, I realised it wasn’t only about the conflict or exile,” he says. “It was about a child who felt unseen – and through Rosa’s story, I found a way to forgive.” That self-recognition, he adds, reshaped the film’s ending into something closer to healing than tragedy.

Alex says the choice of setting was to signal right away that the story is one rooted in the indigenous experience and tied to a very specific time and place. He adds, “I believe the setup should be as immediate as possible, and filming in Quechua allowed the audience to grasp the world we were creating without need for extra explanation.”

The landscape in the film feels like a character itself, austere, towering, and accusatory at times. Alex says he and cinematographer Jesse Bronstein were very deliberate when it came to scale.

“We framed with extra headroom so the mountains always loomed, and we leaned into a vertical frame that seemed to trap the characters within the terrain,” he explains. “We also chose specific times of day so that the light, whether sun or twilight, carried weight and spoke to the emotional moment.” It was decisions like these that made sure the mother could be placed against the environment without tipping into postcard imagery.

“Filming during the rainy season turned out to be a gift. The skies felt ominous and unpredictable, mirroring the instability of the story, and the landscapes became less like picturesque backdrops and more like extensions of the characters’ inner worlds,” says Alex.

Not a fan of editing his own material because of a tendency to want to over-fix, Alex co-edited with Antolín Prieto. “The edit requires letting go of the film in your head and embracing the one you actually shot. Working with Antolín helped me step back and see the footage for what it was, not what I wished it to be.”

When I ask Alex about the key ‘withholds’ in the cut, the moments he chose to delay or deny importation to, he says the film, more than anything else, was shaped by subtle shifts in time.

“A good example is the church scene between Rosa (the mother) and the priest. It’s two close-ups and wide, but every decision about when to stay on Rosa, when to cut to the priest, or when to open up to the space changed how the audience entered Rosa’s despair,” he says.

It’s interesting that the title ‘Sheep and Wolves’ suggests some kind of moral fable, and yet the film resists easy binaries. I wanted to know who Alex’s ‘Wolves’, as he conceived them, were in the film, whether they be institutions, rumours, or history itself, and where he wanted to leave audiences on culpability.

“I think you can watch the film without knowing the specifics of Peru in the 1980s and still understand the dynamic,” he explains. “The ‘Wolves’ are never shown directly; they’re implied, always just off screen. We feel their presence through fear; everyone in this world is scared, and so the audience is made to feel like ‘Sheep’.”

Cinema, Alex asserts, inevitably reflects the politics of its time, “but I’m drawn to intimate, personal stories, rather than broad historical accounts.” He says his hope is that audiences connect first with Rosa’s experience and allow themselves to feel “the fear, despair, and longing that comes with her story”.

As someone who often works between fiction and documentary, Alex believes there’s value in entrusting your story to an empathetic listener, noting, “Many of us carry pain but rarely find people who truly listen without judgement.”

When he spoke with women who had lived through these events, he was struck by how much they still carried. And yet, “They were willing to share because their deepest wish was that no one else would suffer as they had.

“I think that’s what motivated me to tell this story. To allow these women’s voices to be heard across the world,” says Alex.

Audiences will find that sound does a lot of the storytelling, from weather and silence to the score by Paulo Gallo, whom Alex calls a “trusted collaborator”. From the beginning, they shared the same perspective that the film needed to remain minimal both visually and sonically. “Every sound had to feel purposeful,” says Alex. The score at the opening sets the tone, warning us of an ominous world full of danger. “But it also carries Rosa’s love for her son. ” Then, “in the fire scene, the music becomes both tender and longing while still warning the audience that something darker lingers beneath.”

In the sound design, they leaned on elements like the wind and ‘baa’s’ of the sheep to shape the atmosphere. “Their presence created contrast with silence, making these quiet moments more piercing.”

Following a Clermont-Ferrand world premiere and an AFI slot, Alex says what struck him most from international audiences was the ability to empathise with Rosa’s struggle. “After the premiere at Clermont, I remember women approaching our lead actress, Sylvia, and telling her how much the film connected with them.

“That reminded me that human emotion is universal. Different cultures have different ways of expressing or processing it, but if you focus on a character’s journey and honour their emotional truth, audiences will connect.”