In the Quechua language, the past is in front of us, because we've already lived it, we see it clearly. The future is behind us because it hasnt happened yet.

Julin Aguilar, Quechua narrator in State of Fear

It's something like sitting on a train facing backwards - you can see what's passed by in front of you, but what's still ahead of the train is behind you. Paco and I spent a week in Lima to holed up in a studio with 4 Quechua speakers from Radio Cultural Amauta, Huanta, Ayacucho, translating State of Fear. It will be the first feature length film to be dubbed into the Quechua language. Because 70% of the victims of Perus war on terror were Quechua speakers, we thought it was of critical importance to make this version.

But how to attempt to understand the profound differences in the Quechua cosmovision and our own linear approach to the past, the effect that it has on us in the present and how we understand our future? Because State of Fear begins in the present, flashes back 20 years, then flashes forward to the present often, we agonized over how to translate lines like, "Because of what Vera (Lentz) photographed back then, it would be 20 years before she dared return."

Or the Quechua concept of reconciliation. State of Fear is based on the findings of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so reconciliation and memory are clearly important ideas throughout the film. In Quechua the word reconcile means "to bury" or "to forget." And because Quechua dwells very much in the present, when a memory is recalled, it is felt as deeply as if one is experiencing it for the first time.

I came to have an enormous new appreciation for the beauty and complexity of Quechua---the words with 16 syllables, the warmth of the phrases, and the elocution of the radio announcers, our Andean collaborators who became the different voices of the characters in State of Fear. Imagine Lima lawyer Beatriz Alba Hart speaking Quechua!