Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyondThe documentary chronicles Valencia’s stubborn attempts to get permission from the Disney corporation for his “Lion King” project. He e-mails, he calls, he D.M.s, but he never hears back from the company. “Runa Simi” uses very little copyrighted material, but Peru has more rigid rules regarding fair use than does the U.S. So far, Zegarra told me, no commercial distributor has been willing to risk showing “Runa Simi” in Peruvian theatres without written permission from Disney. It’s all very meta: a documentary about the unauthorized translation of a film, both caught in a legal limbo. When “Runa Simi” screened at the Lima Film Festival last year, it won the Audience Award. Zegarra has made the most celebrated Peruvian documentary in decades. Still, only a handful of Peruvians have been able to see it. (Disney declined to comment.)The two collaborators last visited New York in June, 2025, for the Tribeca Festival, when Zegarra won the award for Best New Documentary Director. After attending a screening of “Runa Simi,” an audience member was so moved that he gave Valencia tickets to see “The Lion King” on Broadway with his teen-age son, Dylan, who voices Simba in the Quechua version. (There are no lions in the Andes—or kings, for that matter—so the title is one of the relatively few phrases that remain untranslated.) When the curtain went up, Valencia spent the first several minutes overcome by emotion, glassy-eyed and weeping. “Every language has a spiritual meaning,” he said. “And the characters had different personalities for me because I’d translated them.” Watching the musical, he felt as if he knew the lines by heart. “In my head, I was hearing it in Quechua.”Released in 1994, the original “Lion King” was the highest-grossing film of the year, and the highest-grossing animated film in history until “Finding Nemo” broke that record, in 2003. But, more than three decades later, “The Lion King” doesn’t take up much real estate in the Disney Store: besides plush toys of Simba and Nala, there’s hardly any trace of it. So, why did Valencia tackle “The Lion King”? He saw it in 1995, when he was six years old, on a small black-and-white television at home in Cuzco. “It was the first movie I saw all the way to the end,” he said.This was more than Zegarra had managed. He, too, was six years old when he saw the film, at a theatre in Lima; he cried so much that he was dragged out halfway through. “My version of ‘The Lion King’ ends with Mufasa dying,” he said.Valencia believes that the way to preserve a language is to get kids to speak it. “Entertainment is a right,” he said. “Quechua saved my life. It gave me purpose.” Just then, the strains of a familiar song wafted across the store, and Valencia and Zegarra followed it, past a Lightning McQueen replica, to a tiny area where a half-dozen child-size chairs were arranged before a screen. The song was “Hakuna Matata,” sung by Timon, Pumbaa, and a young Simba. The scene happened to be the first clip that Valencia had translated and dubbed a decade ago, when his quixotic project had begun. “The Lion King” has been dubbed into more than forty languages, most of which keep the song’s Swahili title. For the unauthorized Quechua version, Valencia took the liberty of changing it: “Hakuna Matata” became “Hakuchu Munayta,” which means, roughly, “Let’s walk together in beauty.” As the chorus played, and as the cartoon characters bounced along the screen, he sang along, in Quechua. ?