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.