Runa Simi

In the documentary Runa Simi, Peruvian director Augusto Zegarra follows the journey of Fernando Valencia, a radio host and self-taught voice actor from Cusco in his quest to dub global popular culture into Quechua. What began as a viral YouTube curiosity, Fernando’s dubbing of “Hakuna Matata” from The Lion King, unfolds into a nine-year chronicle of linguistic activism. Both Valencia and Zegarra were present at the screening of the film at FIFDH 2026.

The premise sounds deceptively simple: Valencia wants to dub The Lion King into Quechua. With around 10 million speakers, Quechua is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in South America. For Valencia, dubbing the film is a way of building a pathway between Andean culture and contemporary media, placing Quechua within the cultural present.

This ambition, however, quickly collides with a web of structural barriers: intellectual property laws, cultural hierarchies, and long-standing discrimination against Indigenous languages. As Valencia explains, “if you don’t respect the speakers, it’s impossible to respect the language. That’s what is happening right now in Peru, and in a large part of South America.”

The central obstacle is obtaining permission from Disney. The documentary follows Valencia’s repeated attempts to contact the company, from phone calls to emails and social media messages. In Parallel he also gets in touch with various institutions, who express interest but never offer concrete support. As Zegarra notes, “indigenous communities receive promises all the time, from governments, the private sector, NGOs, from individuals. And very often those promises are empty.”

Runa Simi is less about the corporation that never answers than about the community. Undeterred, Valencia moves forward with his plans in practical ways, organising casting sessions for voice actors and visiting rural schools where he screens his earlier clips. For Valencia and the actors who join him, there is a shared motivation: not only to teach younger generations about the value of their language but to integrate older generations who speak nothing other than Quechua. 

These older generations become some of the film’s central figures, appearing both within Valencia’s family and among the participants in the project. Their presence gives the film the feeling of a collective embrace of inclusion. Many accessed the world only through radio broadcasts in Quechua. As Zegarra reflects, “my grandmother did not want my mother or her children to learn Quechua because of the discrimination. That’s something that has happened to many Peruvians.”

The documentary’s final ambition is to bring Runa Simi directly to Quechua-speaking communities. A fully Quechua version has already been dubbed and circulated in towns like Paccarectambo, where an 80-year-old said: “This is the first time in my life that I fully understood a movie”. In doing so, the project transforms from a story of one man’s linguistic activism into a collective endeavour of cultural affirmation.