Not the same story under the radar

As Latin American program coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Film and Video Center (FVC), I was pleasantly surprised that the 53rd International Film Seminar included indigenous video from Mexico. The FVC presents –
and therefore engages in the representation of – contemporary indigenous views and voices from Latin America in the unlikely forum of a national museum in the United States. The implicit task of such media at a Flaherty Seminar is the opportunity to question dominant misconceptions that continue to encapsulate the often collective and underestimated production of “otherized” cultural constituencies.

South of the Other acknowledged the distortions in historic and colonial constructions of otherness in film, and strove to articulate alternative curatorial models for the presentation of a multiplicity of narratives and visions from the alleged borders, edges, undersides and seams of mainstream media and traditional ethnography.

The selection of artists and works for the 53rd version of the IFS included experimental documentaries that subverted traditional notions of the genre – blending subjectivity, immersing the camera in the scene, and giving voice to characters that we rarely get to hear speak. The works of director Dante Cerano brought us deadly agency from within a cornfield (Xanini, 1999), and an intimate chronicling of a traditional post-wedding ceremony (Dia 2), where a woman taps the camera lens as she dances down a street in Mexico – it is a casual act of acknowledging the recording taking place; the filmmaker is there, we are there, and she knows it. We have been greeted, pulled into the moment; we are a part of the act.

Rich discussions followed the screenings, ranging from the ethical to the aesthetic. We heard of the filmmakers’ challenges with the nuances of representation and also their desire to accurately reflect and stage traditional stories – along with the struggle to put forth a personal creative vision, sometimes in the light of daunting and harsh realities.

The South of the Other approach to cinema walks the line of avoiding a survey-style retrospective of third cinema, while finding the generative threads that hold personal stories of displacement, intervention and resilience together. Works that expose the relationships between the artists, their communities, and the contexts in which they were produced are much more tactile and allow the audience to engage the themes, rather than simply absorb them. Alternative models, not only in content, but of agency and curatorship, provide the context through which we see ourselves in the films we watch.

2007 Muestra de Cine y Cooperación: “Construyendo comunicación desde los Pueblos Indígenas”

Indigenous people don’t just have to be input consumers, they also have the right to use the media to let people know what indigenous people are all about and what they really think.

They have the right to use the media in a way that they don’t lose their cultural identity. Everything depends on the proper use of the media and the way they reflect themselves against non-indigenous people.

Presenting the 2007 Muestra de Cine y Cooperación: “Construyendo comunicación desde los Pueblos Indígenas”

If General Custer would lift his head up, he would faint with his boots pointed to the sky, because he would see in the Cinema Festival Cooperation 2007, Indigenous people that are willing to strenghten their own development, lives and cultures utilising all types of communication.

He would perceive the world the other way around seeing indigenous people as main real characters, telling their own versions of stories, where disadvantaged people keep fighting against deceits that they always pretend to defeat.

As International correspondent of the Latin American Coordinator of Film and Indigenous Communication (CLACPI), Mugarik Gabe will present a cinema festival offering a part of audio-visual material that has been projected for the VIII International Indigenous Cinema Festival organized by CLACPI in Oaxaca (Mexico) in June 2006.

During this event you will have the chance to see indigenous production from Mexico, Norway, United States, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Sahara, Senegal, India, Australia, Guatemala and Brasil.

There will be three daily video projections starting at 5:30 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.

The 8 p.m. projection on March 12, 13, 14, and 15 will be a special event because after the video there will be a talk with indigenous people from Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia.

We are waiting for you, to prove that your action of a fair world and a new way of communication are really possible.

www.mugarikgabe.org