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"We basically took over a 4-H youth dorm for 10 days in August in New Mexico and turned it into a Maoist prison camp."

That's as revolutionary an idea as any in the world of low-budget filmmaking.

That was Jim Finn describing the filming of his treatise on Peru's hard-line Shining Path guerrillas a year ago in Albuquerque.

His budget was aided by women with connections to the Downtown arts group Working Classroom. For a week they donated their time to help re-create a prison circa 1989.

Finn's $10,000 effort debuts in Albuquerque this weekend at the Guild Cinema in Nob Hill. There are screenings of the hourlong film "La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo" at 7:30 and 8:45 Friday and Saturday. Finn will attend Friday's screenings.

He described the film in part as a story of "how these 17-year-old girls became killers."

La trinchera luminosa is the "shining trench" of combat, or the prisons from which the Peruvian guerrillas directed much of their cold-blooded Marxist insurgency during the 1990s. Presidente Gonzalo was the nom de guerre of Abimael Guzm n, the ideologue who spent more than a decade crafting the "fourth spear" of a revolutionary philosophy that began with Marx, Lenin and Mao. He then launched a people's revolt that killed tens of thousands. He was captured in 1992 and is serving a life sentence.

The movement recruited heavily from Peru's indigenous population and included women in its hierarchy and among its ranks of killers.

Finn screened his film "Interkosmos" at the Guild in 2005 and chose New Mexico as his Peruvian paradise. Working with Rebeca Mayorga, the former theater director for Working Classroom, he assembled a cast of mostly Mexican women and American Indians.

One surreal scene features the female prisoners re-enacting Macbeth in their Navajo language, in a dramatic way of explaining treachery and deceit. Finn said of the guerrilla leaders: "They wanted (the prisoners) to know how traitors sounded."

Sisters Sophina James and Amanda Louis said they worked with an aunt to translate several scenes into their native tongue.

"Navajo alone is a tough language," Louis said. Putting it up against Shakespeare was quite a challenge, she said.

That was an example of the collaboration between the actors and the filmmaker, said Mayorga, who helped assemble the cast and run rehearsals on the set.

She said the film seemed to be a noble attempt to understand an extreme leftist armed struggle.

"Their idea was good," she said of the Shining Path. "They wanted the rights of poor people to be addressed in Peru."

But the film forcefully illuminates the intense indoctrination and rigid nature of Gonzalo's ideology.

Murals on the prison walls carry messages like "Unchain the fury of the women," "It's better to have a dead father than a live traitor" and "Traitors: We will find you wherever you are, even if we have to drag you from your grave."

"When you take an ideology to an extreme, that's bad," Mayorga said. "And they created a lot of animosity, within their own party and the public."

"It was a really intense, tight, cohesive group that was totally committed to (Gonzalo) and this Maoist revolution," Finn said.

Much of the dialogue and the music (marching songs in the vein of "The Internationale") were taken by Finn directly from the writings and teachings of the Shining Path. He tapped songwriting pals Jim Becker (from the bands Califone and Freakwater) and Colleen Burke (Smog, We Regazzi) for the music.

The result is a mix of symbolism and extended monologues that challenge the viewer to keep up with the subtitles.

Some viewers have wondered whether the film is a documentary, the director said.

The film has the aura of found footage, as if Finn stumbled across some recordings made by prisoners and edited them into a documentary.

He shot it on Hi-8 analog videotape, the technology of the late 1980s.

"I want to make it look as if it were video from 1989 or '90," he said.

The result has the feel of a propaganda document or the work of an undercover PBS crew.

"I want it to look like kind of a high-quality home video of the Shining Path," Finn said a year ago when he was in the middle of editing the film. "I'm not going for a fake documentary as much as a home-video look."

Finn developed an indie reputation for years in Chicago and now is in a film program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. "Interkosmos" was a deadpan study of a Soviet-style space program in the 1970s. His next project is a look at the Juche political movement in North Korea.

He obviously has a fascination with communist philosophy past and present. He says that studying South America's most notorious Marxist guerrillas can provide insight into the mind-set of insurgents plying their trade today.

"One thing I think is interesting," Finn said, "is how much importance we give to all the military power and economic power of the U.S., but ultimately no matter how many billions are spent, it's seems like it's always a 19-year-old with a Kalashnikov and some homemade bombs that can bring us down. Why is that?

"It's not just a matter of national pride or guerrilla strategy; it's also ideology and the belief that something better awaits when this whole nightmare is over. That's really what I wanted to get inside of.

"And for us in the States it's hard to understand why people are blowing us up or killing themselves or us," he concluded. "So even though the Shining Path is basically this forgotten brutal guerrilla movement, it's still relevant."