But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others

This collective session features film-makers and contemporary indigenous artists who use film as a key medium to represent indigenous peoples’ cosmovision. They all share the search for an audiovisual language adapted to ritual understood as a paradigm for an indigenous identity that bears a close relation to their community and nature. Isael and Sueli Maxacali, from the Maxacali community of Minas Gerais (Brazil), film a collective theatre in their own village, in which their people metamorphose into yamiys, spirits of the Maxacali cemetery that mutate into different animate and inanimate beings. Tawna. Cine desde territorio (Tawna. Film from Territory) is a collective that develops audiovisual projects with the aim of decolonising gazes and narrations from Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, thereby proposing that vernacular stories be told and filmed from the place inhabited and defended by the same autochthonous people in a committed exercise of self-representation. In Tuku, some children look for a worm as they hear a tale about the healing powers attributed to these invertebrates. Elsewhere, Saúl Kak, from the indigenous Zoque people, in collaboration with North American film-maker Charles Fairbanks, explores the mass displacement of the Zoque population after the eruption of the Chichonal volcano in Mexico. It also recounts how this same community has sought refuge in a place where Chiapas oral culture shapes their daily life through ever-present loudspeakers located around the whole village, random technology combining monument, totem and village resident. Finally, Mapuche Francisco Huichaqueo calls for the Mapuche community, hounded in Chile, to express itself through dreams, poetry and hallucination. In Kuifi ül. Ancient Sound the ancestral instrument the trutruka characterises the ceremony of Wüñoy tripantu, the Mapuche New Year, while in Kuzen. Full Moon Songs a poem by Mapuche writer and musician Leonel Lienlaf sets the rhythm of time.

This session devoted to child and family audiences is made up of short animated films made in collaboration or joint authorship with different indigenous communities from Latin America. The pieces are shot in their original language, and will be brought to life by the cultural association La Parcería Infancia y Familia, which will work alongside artists and poets Lilián Pallares and Charles Olsen on a series of playful-poetic actions to accompany and connect with, through children’s gazes, this journey to see, listen and broaden our own sense of the world towards the roots of the thousand-year cultural reality of indigenous peoples. The common thread of the different short films is the passing-on of the idea of identity and memory through minority languages, and the interpretation of stories from oral tradition about the origin of the world and life. The Origin of the Sun and Moon, The Origin of the Rainbow and The Wild Animal that Didn’t Want to Get Dirty belong to the famed Mexican series 68 voces, 68 corazones (68 Voices, 68 Hearts), which compiles 68 languages from Mexico by way of 68 indigenous stories recorded in their own languages. Konāgxeka. The Maxakali Flood explores the myth of flooding as a punishment for selfishness and human greed, a belief of the Maxacali ethnic group from Minas Gerais (Brazil), with the illustrations made in a workshop by these indigenous people. Mātanāg. The Enchanted Lady is another example of Maxacali sung cinema and narrates the connection between the afterlife and the world of the living through the journey between both kingdoms of the Maxacali protagonist Mātanāg. In Pacha, We Are Clay. Pacha and Souls, Aldana Loiseau uses clay to tell a story about the relationship between life and earth, and finally, The Creation of the World stems from a collaboration between its author, Antonio Coello, and elderly women and girls of the Seri people (a community from the Mexican state of Sonora), leading to an investigation of oral stories, vernacular songs and cave paintings. The result is a beautiful Seri version of the birth of the world.     

This session devoted to child and family audiences is made up of short animated films made in collaboration or joint authorship with different indigenous communities from Latin America. The pieces are filmed in their original language and are brought to life by the cultural association La Parcería. The common thread of the different short films is the passing-on of the idea of identity and memory through minority languages, and the interpretation of stories from oral tradition about the origin of the world and life. The Origin of the Sun and Moon, The Origin of the Rainbow and The Wild Animal that Didn’t Want to Get Dirty belong to the famed Mexican series 68 voces, 68 corazones (68 Voices, 68 Hearts), which compiles 68 languages from Mexico by way of 68 indigenous stories recorded in their own languages. Konāgxeka. The Maxakali Flood explores the myth of flooding as a punishment for selfishness and human greed, a belief of the Maxacali ethnic group from Minas Gerais (Brazil), with the illustrations made in a workshop by these indigenous people. Mātanāg. The Enchanted Lady is another example of Maxacali sung cinema and narrates the connection between the afterlife and the world of the living through the journey between both kingdoms of the Maxacali protagonist Mātanāg. In Pacha, We Are Clay. Pacha and Souls, Aldana Loiseau uses clay to tell a story about the relationship between life and earth, and finally, The Creation of the World stems from a collaboration between its author, Antonio Coello, and elderly women and girls of the Seri people (a community from the Mexican state of Sonora), leading to an investigation of oral stories, vernacular songs and cave paintings. The result is a beautiful Seri version of the birth of the world.