This Indigenous voice actor is on a quest to dub Disneys The Lion King into Quechua

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Set us as preferred For many children living in remote towns across the Peruvian Andes, movies only exist in the form of bootleg DVDs — Hollywood films dubbed in Spanish or in English with Spanish subtitles.Many of these kids, however, only fully understand Quechua, an Indigenous language spoken by around 10 million people across multiple South American countries.Enter Fernando Valencia, a voice actor raised in the Andean town of Huanimpampa.“I thought, ‘I’d love to give this group of kids a chance to watch at least a little bit of these movies in their own language.’ And I didn’t want to only do a literal translation but make the extra effort to provide a proper dub with lip-sync where the characters’ voices sound exactly the way they should,” Valencia said in Spanish, changing his voice to a cartoonish tone during a recent video interview from his home in Cusco.And so Valencia, in a makeshift recording studio, started dubbing fragments of popular Hollywood films into Quechua.

The end result — scenes from movies like “The Lion King,” “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Ice Age” — became known as the Quechua Clips.When the videos went viral online and received local news coverage, institutions started asking Valencia if he had dubbed any of those titles in full.He had not but wished to try.

Thus began his ongoing quest to dub Disney’s animated classic “The Lion King” into Quechua in its entirety.Valencia’s efforts over the course of several years are documented in filmmaker Augusto Zegarra’s first feature, “Runa Simi,” a heartfelt story of language activism in action that premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and is currently playing in theaters in L.A.The challenge, as depicted in the film, is twofold for Valencia.First, he needed to cast a group of Quechua speakers...