Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Bolivia but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Bolivia
Movie: ¿Quién mató a la llamita blanca? [Who Killed the White Llama]
Director: Rodrigo Bellott
Year: 2007
The Elevator Pitch: Jacinto and Domitila are notorious criminals who get paid to transport cocaine through Bolivia to the Brazilian border on a road trip of a life time while they followed by police, question their relationship, do a bunch of cocaine, and get extremely political.
How Was the Movie?: Wow. After such a minimalist movie last week from Georgia the absolute maximalist production of ¿Quién mató a la llamita blanca? wasn’t quite what I was prepared for but this movie is an absolute riot if you’re a specific type of person. I was thinking about how to define a movie like this which occasionally stops to give you a history of Bolivia or detailed information about ethic groups and it’s kind of the experience of listening to a System of a Down song: you’re having a rockin’ good time and then the singer stops to tell you about man made horrors of the US government except in this movie it’s Bolivia.
My husband and I both spent a lot of time laughing at this movie both for the normal reasons and some of them because we’d clearly misunderstood something for a moment. Since the two main characters are indigenous it plays deeply into the themes of the movies and while the movie can at times feel like it’s holding the audience by the hand to explain things (who I am assume are not supposed to be Bolivian?) which often kills the joke but since there’s about a joke every 10 seconds it’s fine for that to be the case. The movie is a heist, road trip, stoner film, and raunchy sex comedy all at once. It goes for everything at the same time which will definitely turn off a lot of people but I just found it endlessly fascinating. I’ve never had any deep thoughts about Bolivia but this movie made me want to look more into the culture and history there (and join a party if I see one happening). Absolutely recommend especially if you like political satire, mid-00s bad text overlays, and drug culture humor.
What was for Dinner?:
I put all my energy into dinner so there wasn’t a dessert for this week but I made Salteñas de Pollo and Lawa de Jankaquipa. Salteñas are kind of like what would happen if a Xiao Long Bao [sometimes called “soup dumplings” in English] and Empanada had a baby. The inside of a the salteña has a stew mixture so if you’re like me, you will probably dump half of it on your lap. I’ve never been so grateful to be eating in my own house as when I basically spilled one of these down my shirt during the movie.
However, like all hand pies, they were absolutely delicious. The outside is colored with annetto which was annoying to track down and also doesn’t really taste like much in this low of a quantity when baked but I decided to do it anyway and the pastries do come out a sort of interesting red-yellow color.
I don’t know if I would ever make salteñas instead of empanadas seeing as I don’t love my hand pie becoming a soup grenade but my husband absolutely loved them.
The second thing I made was of course Lawa de Jankaquipa, which is a kind of soup from the Andes as far as I can tell. I was really in the weeds trying to find Bolivian food information. As far as I can tell, lawas are an entire category of “soup” onto themselves but the base is fresh ground cornmeal. Absolutely would recommend even though I’m not sure I did it correctly. I ended up with something that looked similar and tasted great though I did cheat and grind my corn in a food processor.
I also made some Chuflay inspired cocktails because I can only get French brandy but it was in the spirit of singani I’m sure.
In the end I’m not sure which was more successful, the food or the movie so that’s a real win-win in my book.
That’s it for Bolivia, see you next in Senegal!