Domains of Indigenous Cinema: the problematic of the subject revisited

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the place of indigenous peoples in documentary film, outlining the limits and possibilities that define their condition as subject or object of the documentary film. Based on cinema and anthropological studies, it identifies the extent to which the problem of the constitution of the subject in indigenous cinema allows us to consider a similar research question in the field of humanities. Between the historical and cosmological worlds, the audiovisual field and ante-field, permanent colonialism and counter-coloniality, the domains of power in the indigenous documentary perspective are invariably marked by tensions, fissures and limits. Who, after all, is the Other as subject and/or object of the camera?

Keywords:
Indigenous Cinema; Native Peoples; Documentary Film; Counter-Coloniality; Anthropology

RESUMO

O presente estudo analisa o lugar dos povos originários no filme documentário, delineando os limites e possibilidades que definem sua condição de sujeito ou de objeto da cena documental. A partir dos estudos de cinema e antropológicos, identifica-se em que medida a problemática da constituição do sujeito no cinema indígena permite pensar questão semelhante de pesquisa no campo das humanidades. Entre o mundo histórico e cosmológico, o campo e o antecampo audiovisual, o colonialismo permanente e a contracolonialidade, os domínios do poder na perspectiva documental indígena, invariavelmente, são marcados por tensões, fissuras e limites. Quem, afinal, é o Outro enquanto sujeito e/ou objeto da câmera?

Palavras-chave:
Cinema Indígena; Povos Originários; Filme Documentário; Contracolonialidade; Antropologia

RÉSUMÉ

La présente étude analyse la place des peuples originaires dans le film documentaire, en mettant en évidence les limites et les possibilités qui définissent leur condition de sujet ou d’objet de la scène documentaire. A partir des études cinématographiques et anthropologiques, on identifie dans quelle mesure le problème de la constitution du sujet dans le cinéma indigène permet de réfléchir à une question de recherche similaire dans le domaine des sciences humaines. Entre le monde historique et celui cosmologique, champ et antechamp audiovisuel, colonialisme permanent et contre-colonialité, les domaines du pouvoir dans la perspective documentaire indigène sont, invariablement, marqués par des tensions, des fissures et des limites. Qui, après tout, est l’Autre en tant que sujet et/ou objet de la caméra?

Mots-clés:
Cinéma Indigène; Peuples Originaires; Film Documentaire; Contre-Colonialité; Anthropologie

The strength of this type of epistemological violence or proto-racism - constitutive of the coloniality of seeing - consists, therefore, in a double visual/ontological strategy: making the saved object appear (the cannibal nonbeing) and, at the same time, making it disappear as the subject of observation (Joaquím Barriendos, 2011, p. 21).

How can we film the other without dominating or reducing them? How can we show the strength of a struggle, a demand for justice and dignity, the richness of a culture, the uniqueness of a practice, without caricaturing them, without betraying them with a tourist or advertising translation?

(Jean-Louis Comolli, 2008, p. 30).

Jauára ichê.

Cunhambebe,

Tupinambá chief in conversation with Hans Staden (2019, p. 110).

Part 1 - Prologue

Mokoi tekoá petei jeguatá - Duas aldeias, uma caminhada (2008), by the Mbya Guarani Film Collective, has two emblematic segments on the problem of the subject in indigenous documentary film, which have been exhaustively analyzed in the field of film studies - and which we will return to once again. In the first, which takes place in the Jesuit ruins of São Miguel/RS, we follow the relationships between Guarani children, young people and women and the tourists and students visiting the place, who, as well as buying handicrafts and getting to know the old Mission of the Society of Jesus, ask questions such as: “Are you Guarani?”, “Do you still hunt with bows and arrows like that for real or not?”, “Can I take a photo?”. As we have already observed (Felipe, 2019b; 2020a), between close-ups and distances, the camera captures the spectacle on the same colonial stage updated in the present - surprisingly and coincidentally, on a museological site. We enter a kind of tense interplay, where bodies are attracted and distanced, based on a situation of intense racialization of the subjects. “Can I take a photo?”, a visitor asks a young Guarani man, who immediately interprets her wish as a late overseas traveler, because, in addition to the items of Mbya Guarani art, he was aware that the white woman also wanted to take an image of the Indian “seen” by Pero Vaz de Caminha in 1500.

In the second segment, with camera in hand and without accepting the passive place in the antechamber, we see a testimony unfold in front of the Mbya Guarani camera, with the indigenous director, at one point, interrupting his interviewee to question his comments about the Guarani being “dirty” and avaricious, astonishingly, for charging for photographs that tourists want to take. By reversing the mirrors, director Ariel Ortega highlights certain practices that invariably use the images of native peoples in their work, sell them and get paid for it. At this point, the director cracks the antechamber to oppose the situation of installed coloniality, which shows us that, before any reflexivity, the metafilmic game - here - does not seek to deconstruct the fabrication of the cinematographic work (Nichols, 2005). It is not a study of language, but rather the modulation of the filmic space as a historical space, the passage of individuals from being objects to being subjects of the camera and, above all, cinematic thinking about the world, from the original reverse filmic perspective, as Brazil (2012), Sztutman (2009) and Caixeta de Queiroz (2008) - in the wake of Roy Wagner (2017) - have already pointed out in their field research.

In a process of reviewing what we have already done in terms of research on indigenous cinema in Brazil and Latin America, the first letter of Cogitamos, by Bruno Latour (2016), allowed us to explore science as a field of complex confluences, with the areas of knowledge, with their components and categories, interconnecting and feeding back into each other. In a journey far from any essentialism, refuting the Great Divisions, Latour points to the mutually constitutive dimension of knowledge, as Donna Haraway (2022) wrote in another key, when species meet in co-, interand intra-specific ways. This is what happens in the film Serras da Desordem (2006) - featuring the staged symbiosis of Awá-Guajá bodies with the bodies of apes, capybaras, rivers, leaves, earth, trees and air - in the very first narrative segments, as if we were at the time of the Discovery of Brazil. At this point, director Andrea Tonacci constructs the primal scene, with Awá indigenous people in the midst of the dense forest, natural beings and animals - interconnected. He purposely presents an idyllic and immaculate space, between fictional and documentary history, as in the old ethnographic films, even though it would soon be destroyed by the force of colonialism. A space, from one period of time to another, which Carapiru traverses, interpreting themselves: from fleeing after the massacre of their community in 1977 to being located by FUNAI in 1988 - as a subject exercising their agency inside and outside the cinema, before and after history¹.

But, returning to Latour (2016), in fact, by proposing the inseparability of science and politics as dimensions that intersect, contaminate and dialogue through deviations and combinations, the author of Cogitamos uses the term scientific humanities to characterize knowledge on the frontier, anchored in multiple perspectives and connections. In the complexity that arises, we will consider the questions posed by documentary film intercessionally with the issues of research in the Human Sciences. Literally adopting the terms of the challenge, we ask ourselves how it is possible to establish relationships between the fields of cinema and research in the humanities in order to challenge their procedures and delineate what comes into play when documentary film formulates its problems. In this space of connections, the question inevitably arises as to how indigenous cinema - of a documentary nature - relates to research in the field of the Human Sciences, and it is imperative that we reflect on whether a filmic question can challenge a research question in the field of the Human Sciences, based on tensions, injunctions or connections - especially since the questions are situated in the dimension of the cinematographic, not necessarily in the strict sense - of the specific cinematographic - that the term has for film theory. What presents itself as a challenge, therefore, destabilizes us when we move to place filmic issues in dialogue with issues in the field of training, Anthropology (Viveiros de Castro, 2017) and History (Perrot, 2022) - not forgetting other related areas that are essential to this study.

However, what we are proposing in terms of analyzing the confluence between the problem of the subject’s constitution in documentary cinema and other areas of knowledge will not be extended in comparative terms, because, in addition to not having the space for an essay, our intention here is merely to point out the limits and possibilities of... indigenous cinema, in documentary form, in relation to this issue. As regards the possible contributions of documentary film to research in education, anthropology and history, it should be remembered that the latter two areas have already been covered in academic research by the field of film studies: from film anthropology (France, 2000) to cinema as a counter-analysis of society (Ferro, 1992), respectively. The constitution of the subject is the central issue, which indelibly permeates the areas of documentary film and education as a dimension and field of attraction that seems to structure the other issues. As we situate ourselves in the Lumière Galaxy, especially in the Flahertyan microcosm², we chose to analyze indigenous cinematographies - of a documentary nature - because they are the ones that most significantly caused the displacement of historical agents from the condition of object to subject of the documentary and historical scene. We are therefore in line with the perspectives of Francisco Elinaldo Teixeira (2012, p. 254), who points out that the relationship with the Other is “a seminal aspect in the field of documentary”; and Jean-Claude Bernardet (2011), who identified the same centrality when the Other films oneself or is filmed³.

To this end, we are methodologically interested in indigenous audiovisuals as a product and a process, based on operations concerning the filmic and historical materiality of the works. More than the links with reality, it is important for us to understand how cinema, when constituted as a language, is created in relation to the historical world, which it (re)invents, (re)develops and (re)produces. When we work with indigenous cinematographies, we necessarily move away from the more apparent idea of a document or an open window to the world, because it is often developed under a script that fabricates, absents and fissures what it puts into the frame. In opposition to the visual regimes, the indigenous subjects invariably move in and out of the field of images, since they belong to its fabricated dimension, which generates a certain awareness of the artifact, without any pretension to the tradition of filmic forms or the construction of language. Hence the importance of the metafilmic dimension, which continually brings out the fabricated dimension of cinema, using it as a vector for other historical variables with their own categories and problems of the visible. If there is no boundary between the purely formal and the purely real, we look for the cracks in order to reflect on original cinematographies, because self-referentiality is the contribution to how historical agents constitute themselves as subjects in cinema.

This is a question that has been at the forefront of our research into indigenous cinema for some time, and recurs in our reflections when, more recently, for example, we (re)positioned the indigenous subject of the camera on the stage of history and cinema, as opposed to the colonial parametrization of the Other through the visuality regimes of modernity/Westernism - founded on iconography, anthropometric portraits and the classic ethnographic film (Felipe, 2023).

Part 2 - Concepts and questions revisited

Narrowing our scope a little more, in this confluence of documentary cinema with other fields from the humanities, we can assert that it is impossible to talk about indigenous cinema without talking about training processes, as if the relationship between the emergence of indigenous filmmakers and film collectives and educational experiences were inevitable, which, although not decisive, have been crucial to the production of filmographies by various communities. Analyzing these interfaces leads us to conclude that it is difficult to arrive at the audiovisual productions of indigenous peoples - from the United States, Australia to Brazil - without returning to the training activities implemented by non-governmental organizations, indigenous associations and/or researchers and academics, the most emblematic result of which is the significant collection of images produced on the memory and traditions, history and forms of political and cultural resistance of traditional peoples. As we have already identified (Felipe, 2019a; 2020a), through the work of professors Sol Worth and John Adair, the seminal experience of indigenous cinema was developed, based on training and documentary production work, in 1966, with the Navajo people of Pine Springs, Arizona (USA), resulting in 16 films after a workshop that aimed to enable the Navajo community to have “control over all stages of the process” (Gonçalves, 2016, p. 659).

Image 1
Mosarambihara (2016). Source: ASCURI.

In Brazil, an emblematic and pioneering case can be found in the nongovernmental organization Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages - VNA), created in 1986 by a group of indigenists and anthropologists from the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Center for Indigenist Work - CTI), whose workshops trained filmmakers and collectives in territories from the north to the south of the country, with greater expansion from the 2000s onwards, when the NGO, led by indigenist filmmaker Vincent Carelli, became a kind of indigenous film school.

From the post-VNA⁴ context, comes the experience of the Associação Cultural de Realizadores Indígenas (Cultural Association of Indigenous Filmmakers - ASCURI), created in 2008 after the Cine Sin Fronteras workshops: a project of the Escuela de Cine y Arte de La Paz (ECA/Bolivia) and the Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG), which brought together young indigenous and non-indigenous people in Bolivia, including Gilmar Galache and Eliel Benites⁵, who took part in the activities under the coordination of Quechua filmmaker Ivan Molina. In contact with this political power of cinema, ASCURI developed numerous workshops from 2010 onwards, until it was consolidated in 2015-2016. Key to this were the Mosarambihara Programs (GATI-FUNNAI), with the audiovisual enhancing the Kaiowá’s natural and spiritual dimensions; and the Brazilian edition of Cine Sin Fronteras, which ASCURI was in charge of, with training processes based on the Bolivian method used by its directors in the previous decade, from a perspective of continuous training and greater autonomy for the directors (Schmitz, 2022). Made up of Terena, Kaiowá and Guarani representatives, the collective began to produce guerrilla films combined with intense training work with other peoples: Xavante (Mato Grosso/MT), CintaLarga (Rondônia/RO), Guarani Mbya (Rio de Janeiro/RJ), Javaé (Tocantins/TO) - also involving non-indigenous people. For Terena communicator Gilmar Kikipuko Galache (2017), who produces and thinks of audiovisuals as a political and documentary artifact, the collective’s proposal went against the proposals of Video in the Villages and what he calls informative cinema in his MA research - which analyzes ASCURI’s history from the inside. While we mentioned its presence in the context of indigenous cinema before, it was more evident in two postgraduate studies: a master’s degree (Schmitz, 2022) and a doctorate (Ribeiro, 2023), both of which we participated in as an external examiner.

According to Galache (2017), in general, experiences such as those of the VNA and informative cinema (industrial, narrative, Hollywood) are more focused on the idea of the filmmaker, on individual rather than collective signatures; on the election of personalities in the villages, as if some subjects were more important and representative than others; on a more hierarchical rather than horizontal approach to the role of agents and indigenous audiovisual production. For ASCURI, on the other hand, the focus should be on capturing the strength and resistance of the communities.

On the one hand, for Ribeiro (2023), this valorization of a collective enunciation, stripping away certain modes of representation and the end of authorism, is revealed in the way the group signs the films it produces; on the other hand, the way ASCURI’s productions are made incorporates the formative dimensions, the language and specificities of the environment, the natural and spiritual elements and the communities’ struggle for territory. The Mosarambihara Program - Semeadores do Bemiver (Sowers of Good Living), whose formative, spiritual and intergenerational sustainability practices were recorded in the documentary Mosarambihara (2016), is confused as a community action with the film that documents it. It was proposed to the then Environmental and Territorial Management in Indigenous Lands project (“Gestão Ambiental e Territorial em Terras Indígenas” - GATI/FUNAI) and was implemented in several villages, with “[...] audiovisual workshops, the planting of traditional gardens, the recovery of springs, and the appreciation of our elders, always with a focus on the search for the Guarani Kaiowá way of life” (Mosarambiara, 2016). Between the presence of the Kaiowá leaders and traditional teachers in the films and the new generation of apprentices, who are transforming themselves and their habitat with sustainability practices, the audience comes into contact with sacred songs intertwined with different perspectives. In this process of consciousness-raising and autonomy, as we heard in the testimony of Eliel Benites (director, university professor and program coordinator), the indigenous subject merges with the local ecosystems in the permanent search for balance between the inseparable elements of nature and Guarani and Kaiowá spirituality.

The Australian case, where cinema presents itself as one of the ways of confronting the latent colonialism that affects Aboriginal populations, involves the relationship between American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli and the indigenous peoples around the Karrabing Film Collective: a kind of “[...] grassroots cooperative of friends and family [...] whose lives interconnect throughout the coastal waters west of Darwin and along Anson Bay at the mouth of the Daly River, extending into a global and transnational network of curators, artists and filmmakers” (Lea; Povinelli, 2021, p. 156). In 2007, when the government act called The Intervention was enacted, hundreds of families from Belyuen abandoned the settlement and moved to Bulgul, on the Daly River, to live near their ancestral spaces. As an act of resistance, they created the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation, whose Karrabing Film Collective is their cinematic expression, a space for experimentation and politics in the face of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response. The inaugural works in Karrabing’s filmography, which are presented as a response to the colonial practices of contemporary Australia, are the Intervention Trilogy, made up of the films When the Dogs Talked (2014), Windjarrameru, The Stealing C-nt$ (2015) and Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016)⁶.

However, our aim is not to think of the films as products of “training courses” or to identify, in the modes of documentary (Nichols, 2005), signs of the methodologies “taught” - in the materiality or narrative structure of the works. Once again, we would like to make it clear that we will not be investigating the instrumental dimension of cinema, as is commonly done in proposals that attempt to regulate the use of film in the classroom. Nor do we intend to explore audiovisual productions and teaching materials in correlation, with a view to looking for oppositions, complementarities and autonomies or to establish a methodology that programs certain pedagogical practices. Nor do we intend a counter-colonial pedagogy aimed at “education of the gaze”, in the terms of Zárate Moedano, Hernández Vásquez and MéndezTello (2019, p. 208): “that is, to potentiate the capacity of subjects to problematize what comes” or “to form gazes in resistance to the coloniality of seeing [...]”. Focusing on the constitution of the subject in the documentary film, we are interested in understanding, intercessionally, the extent to which this issue raised by indigenous cinema can shed light on a similar research topic in the Human Sciences, specifically in Education. This is mainly because it is a field where subjects must critically occupy formative processes, based on their awareness as liberating historical agents seeking to transform the world and themselves (Freire, 2016)⁷, because the subject of training is not the subject of education or learning, but the subject of experience, which, once reworked, makes them who they are and transforms them (Larrosa, 2022). In this context, cinematography originates as a significant field for the (re)shaping of experience by the subjects of the camera.

To this end, as we have already observed (Felipe, 2019a; 2020a; 2020c), indigenous cinema overcomes the tendencies of ethnographic and counterhegemonic film, based on a process of inter-epistemic construction and alliances of perspectives anchored in the outside but shared gaze (in the case of indigenous filmmakers); and in the inside gaze, but contaminated by internal and external contexts, which strain the relationship between communities and national society and mark the poetics of indigenous filmmakers. However, when the subjects of the experience position themselves in front of or behind the camera, we move closer to a reverse filmic pragmatics, which turns to their world and the world around them: with, for, from and not just about the Other - resolutely, back to the colonial gaze of national society⁸. In this movement, indigenous cinematographies have consolidated themselves in a different way from post-colonial cinemas, which almost always resemble travelers’ accounts with their stereotypes, caricatures and reductionism. Firstly, because, besides not experiencing community problems, they always seek to rectify the colonial image of the Other without their participation; secondly, by sticking to folkloric dimensions, they don’t challenge situations of coloniality, which continue to deny the historical agency of native peoples. Finally, there is always the desire to tell the Other how and what needs to be done, supposedly giving them a voice that simultaneously suppresses them, as Salazar (2004) observed when he viewed indigenous media as a place of experience in conflict with national society.

In the wake of the quilombola leadership of Antonio Bispo dos Santos, Guimarães and Flores (2020, p. 3-4) identified aspects that help us situate indigenous cinema as an aesthetic of counter-colonization, which takes place “from within”, driven by the agents themselves, based on “processes of resistance”, with a view to guaranteeing the right to their territories, ways of life and of living⁹. Conceptually and politically, these dimensions do not just apply to indigenous filmmakers, since although indigenist filmmakers sometimes adopt the “institutional framework”, in exemplary cases they film “the singularity of the encounter with the other” and question “the approach of the invader” (Alvarenga, 2017)¹⁰. They define a cinema that constitutes the subject of images, based on a shared filmic praxis, which is inter-epistemic and interconnected with other agencies. We also believe that the films’ grounding in community issues differentiates the poetics of directors like Vincent Carelli and Andréa Tonacci from other authorized cinematographic perspectives, which, based on the colonizing gaze, position themselves from the outside about and not necessarily with the Other. Precisely because they never meet their gaze, nor open themselves up so that it can intercept and jeopardize the ocularcentric perspective of modernity/Westernism (Barriendos, 2011), they don’t even get close to the historical experience of the native peoples’ communities. Far from other molds (third cinema, new cinemas, peripheral cinema¹¹), with a greater degree of counter-coloniality¹², indigenous cinema is linked to the habitat of the subjects with their own ways of living, constituted in a communal way, although inevitably in cohabitation with national society, but self-managing the processes of audiovisual production and open to a self-mise en scène of the subjects of that experience.

If we adopt Teixeira’s terms (2012), we can conclude that, in original cinematographies, the voice of the Other is confirmed when the subjects constitute themselves as intercessors and not as interlocutors, as agents and not objects of the documentary scene. In this context, “[...] filmmakers and characters intercede, they pass from one to the other, not embedded identities, established knowledge or common-sense meanings, but precisely what puts all these immediate data of reality on the line, beyond which new possibilities of life can acquire inscription” (Teixeira, 2012, p. 257). In the confluence of approaches, we find in the Decolonial perspective the most appropriate interpretation of post-colonial criticism, which, starting with the Modernity/Coloniality Group (M/C) in the 2000s, laid bare the permanence of colonialist praxis today. In this process of revision, we began to realize that, in addition to Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha, Latin American researchers have reconsidered the post as a central praxis in the contemporary world, using the key concepts of coloniality and decoloniality and breaking down the colonialist domains in the fields of power, knowledge and being. Linking ourselves to the Decolonial was not difficult in order to raise questions about/from indigenous cinema, because if post-colonial cinematographies were no longer sufficient or proved to be innocuous, we sought out audiovisual processes and products from their own agents. Thus, we chose to outline the filmic pragmatics that originated against the backdrop of modern/colonial visual regimes, founded on the double negation of the Other, by paradoxically promoting its disappearance as a subject of observation, making it visible as an object in its cannibalism (Barriendos, 2011).

From the decolonialists, Brazilian anthropology and indigenous intellectuals, expanding our theoretical and methodological horizons has been inevitable, which has repeatedly led us to (re)situate the problems of the originating world and, by extension, the dimension of the subject in the field of film processes¹³. In this context, with Carneiro da Cunha (2017) and Viveiros de Castro (2017), the discussion on identity and ethnicity is fundamental, since the original peoples do not belong to the field of immutability, but, by permanently (re)inventing themselves, they conceive of contact in a relational way by incorporating the Other in order to alter themselves on their own terms¹⁴. With Castro-Gómez (2005. p. 80, 82), we see Western modernity as a “machine that generates alterities” which, in order to invent civilization, invented its counterpart: “the imaginary of barbarism” - as an anthropocentric project, based on the idea of progress and reason. Within this framework, the thinker, writer and activist Maya kaqchikel Aura Cumes draws attention to el sujeto del UNO, which tries to erase the difference, multiplicity, diversity of life and agency of indigenous peoples, reduced to the condition of ethnic subjects (Laboratorio de Pedagogías Críticas, 2019). If the concepts of coloniality and countercoloniality attract other categories, Barriendos’ (2011) formulation of the coloniality of seeing stands out: that (re)orders, in a heterarchical way, the imagetic production of the dehumanization of the Other as cannibal, exotic, savage, fantastic and anthropophagous.

As Aura Cumes (2012) said in an interview:

What I propose is that we should always remember that concepts have a history, and the concept of culture, like the others, has its own history. I am very struck by the way in which the concepts have been applied in our realities and it is not at all disconnected from their global application [...]. For example, the term culture as it is used at the moment is not remembering that the peoples to whom it is being applied were initially named under deterministic parameters that subjected them as a collective, such as the concepts of species [...]. [...] [The concepts of] species and race subjugated, invented the Indians as servants, as the servitude of our countries.

When we look at the audiovisual and historical dimensions of the works, the work with images needs to be based on mutually constitutive operations between the historical space and the filmic space. We already know, through Comolli (2015), that by sharing the secret of mirrors, cinema not only reflects, but also manufactures the world as a filmic event. In this process of revision, faced with the question of how subjects are constituted in indigenous cinema, it was necessary to return to the formulations around the antechamber which, in Brasil (2013), reveals the permeability between reality and representation. In his analysis, it becomes a central category because, as it is always surpassed, with the subjects entering the scene, representation “[...] comes to harbor, procedurally, a relationship of mutual implication and alteration between those who film and those who are filmed, between the lived world (extradiegetic) and the filmic world (diegetic)” (Brasil, 2013, p. 569). As we propose, based on Faye Ginsburg’s concept of embedded aesthetics, these cinematographies are formed within community logics, as processes and products of political-cultural intervention (Cordova, 2011). Even at the risk of a certain essentialism, they encapsulate what can be described as originary cinema, which, as the leader Sula Fernanda (ASCURI BRAZIL, 2020) of the Yamurikumã Association of Xinguan Women (Yamurikumã)¹⁵ remarked, “shows reality from the inside out”, turning, in its own way, to the ancestral knowledge of traditional peoples. Mainly because, borrowing from Larrosa’s (2022) reflections on the field of education, those who have nothing happen to them, nothing affect them, nothing threaten them, nothing occur to them, are incapable of (re) working out their experience of the historical world.

Part 3 - Frictions and limits of indigenous documentary film

As a counterpoint to this political, symbolic and cultural panorama, or rather, to permanent colonialism in its various forms, to consider indigenous cinema is to take as a reference that the participation of the Other takes place in all stages of audiovisual production, including, once again echoing Shohat and Stam (2006), within the scope of the conception and theoretical approach itself. If, in the field of anthropology, when theorizing about the “method of controlled equivocation”, Viveiros de Castro (2018 - quotation marks and author’s terms) already called certain procedures of the discipline into question, wondering to what extent, in research, individuals are configured as theoretical agents and not just as passive “subjects”, it is also fundamental to ask ourselves how indigenous agents themselves conceive of the historical world as a filmic event or object of the cinema they make. When problematizing the division proposed by Greg Urban between given facts and constructed facts, Viveiros de Castro (2018, p. 257) feels a certain discomfort “[...] when he notes that Urban’s division of the world - into a given plane of jaguars and pine trees, and a constructed world of groups and emblems - is not the division made by the Xoklengs”. So how do the subjects of the experience think of themselves in this mediated world? Revisiting the non-governmental organization Vídeo nas Aldeias, a dimension of countercoloniality in indigenous cinema can be identified when the agents formulate conceptions about their own image in the context of recording (in the case of the directors) and broadcasting (in the case of the subjects within the film, commonly read as “characters”) (Gallois; Carelli, 1991). This is recurrently the case in Xavante filmography and, within the films, in the leaders’ perception of control over what should or should not be constituted as an image, how they should present themselves and the community.

Já me transformei em imagem (I’ve transformed myself into an image - 2008), by Zezinho Yube, is not just the title of a documentary, but the Hunikuin’s perception of themselves and of cinema, when they confronted historical periodization and colonial visual regimes¹⁶. In this vein, the director Divino Tserewahú Xavante, in a course at the Transversal Training Program in Traditional Knowledge at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in 2016, conceived of indigenous cinema as the result of negotiation with the leaders and the logic of Xavante rituals, specifically in the case of films that should be made for the community itself: without translation into Portuguese, preserving the multiplicity of perspectives; and with longer shots and temporality (Brasil; Belisário, 2016). There is also a revisionist filmic praxis of the archives of modernity/coloniality, which already constitutes a policy of indigenous cinema, permanently in tension with world film archives, revising colonial collections and telling its own version of history (Cordova, 2011). By challenging the construction of the Other in cinema, analyzing them as a figure in the image and the place they occupy in the documentary and historical setting, we enter the realm of metafilm and think about cinema itself. To quote Corrigan (2015, p. 183, 190) once again, “before acting as artistic commentary”, cinema establishes “a filmic thinking of the world”, because the objectified characters change status, placing themselves at the same time as central characters and vectors that rework the world in the frame - as we have already analyzed in Desterro Guarani (2011)¹⁷, from the emblematic segment in the screening of Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986), which the indigenous filmmakers and Mbya Guarani agents deconstruct (Felipe, 2019b; 2020a).

In the wake of postcolonial criticism, we opened ourselves up to reflections that called into question the permanent desire to - always - speak for the Other or adopt their point of view, without finding their gaze and/or allowing them to intercept (our) colonial perspectives, as Haraway (2022) reflected in these same terms, scrutinizing other worlds and provoking us by their similarity. We noted that the approach should not be reduced to a certain culturalism, but rather to finding counter-colonizing film pragmatics that reveal the colonial situation or, as we reviewed with the decolonialists, coloniality; and (re)situate the Other on the stage of history and cinema. On this front, the reflexivity of the documentary film (the film within the film, the instances of enunciation in the field of the image, comments on the (re)production and (re)invention of what is visible), which is not accidental in indigenous cinema, reveals the very condition of the filmmakers. Above all because, as we have already pointed out, there is a latent inseparability between what is inside and outside the field of the image, when the filmmakers make their records about their world and about themselves, with the camera in hand always in frame.

Image 2
Frame from Guardiões da Floresta - Last narrative segment. Source: Zawxiperkwer Ka’a: Guardiões da Floresta (2019).

Image 3
Frame from Guardiões da Floresta - Last narrative segment. Source: Zawxiperkwer Ka’a: Guardiões da Floresta (2019).

Without being a stylistic exercise, nor an accidental act, these are dimensions that emerge as marks in Zawxiperkwer Ka’a: Guardians of the Forest (2019), by Jocy and Milson Guajajara, who documented the surveillance units of the Caru and Awá communities, of the Guajajara and Awá-Guajá peoples, called ..... Guardians of the Forest. Through the lens of Jocy and Milson Guajajara, the tensions between the communities and national society are revealed, with the Guardians of the Forest seeking to maintain sovereignty over their territory in a film divided into three parts: I. Caru Indigenous Land; II. North Base, Awa Indigenous Land; and III. Surroundings of the North Base. In none of the segments of the documentary Guardians of the Forest is the subject of the camera other than one of the agents of the surveillance units, whom we accompany on incursions along rivers and dusty roads, allowing us to experience the film from the inside rather than a representation of the indigenous question in Brazil. Throughout the segments, the Guajajaras directors root the camera in the historical world, making the film scenes inseparable from the events because they are also part of it.

In two moments, the tension of the record emerges in the frame: first, when the Guardians of the Forest identify and detain a group of invaders in their territory (three young men), who, in the middle of the forest, raise cattle and harvest wood.

From the encounter with the invaders to the arrival of the father of one of them, the camera intensely follows the whole process, capturing the scene and protecting itself in the distance between branches and trees. At the end, between two shots, the instability of the frame is inscribed in the materiality of the experience of the world, in which, after a shot of indigenous people with binoculars monitoring the herd of cattle and the jagunços from the local farms advancing through the TI, the optical dimension shows how filmic space and historical space are mutually constitutive. Precisely because of this, the real is always placed at a distance from the Guajajara lenses for the protection of the filmmakers, who regulate the lens so as not to be seen and hit by the gunshot we suddenly hear. Mainly “[...] because, in indigenous cinema, the act of documenting history does not happen without scars and erasures, because the making of the film is lived as a process, experiencing the very tensions of the record” (Felipe, 2023, p. 23). In this documentary, the filmic and historical fields are impregnated with the unpredictability and urgency of the experience of the world, which is, for Larrosa (2022, p. 40), considering other contexts and issues, “from here and now, mortal, flesh and blood, like life itself” and “has something of the opacity, obscurity and confusion of life”.

Image 4
Frame from Força e luta da retomada da aldeia Pindo Roky (2013). Source: ASCURI.

Image 5
Frame from Vida e Luta na Retomada Tei’ykue (2018). Source: ASCURI.

Image 6
Frame de Yvy Reñoi - Semente da terra (2018). Source: ASCURI.

Image 7
Frame from Yvy Reñoi - Semente da terra (2018). Source: ASCURI.

Returning to ASCURI’s filmography, from the perspective of guerrilla cinema, the Guarani and Kaiowá retakings are recurrent in front of its lens, with the documentary record on the battlefront, also impregnated with the historical experience of the world and at the risk of the real, which traverses it, transposes it, transports it, surpasses it and grounds it, because, with Comolli (2008, p. 30), we already know that “one does not film or watch with impunity”.

The film Força e luta da retomada da aldeia Pindo Roky (Strength and struggle in the retaking of the Pindo Roky village) (2013) is based on testimonies and accounts by Guarani Kaiowá, placing us, among leaders and children in the woods and streams, at the center of the retaking of the Pindo Rocky Village by the Te’ýikue community in Caarapó, Mato Grosso do Sul/MS. The stories reveal the history of oppression and loss, murders and killings of young people by the militias of local farmers. Entangled in chants, with the maraca mobilizing bodies and speech, the dimensions of Kaiowá spirituality and the meaning of land and nature emerge, as well as the recurring expression “this land is ours”, which expands - dismissing - the notion of borders, especially for a people permanently on the move for tekoha guasu (big land). The camera focuses on the spaces of the retaking, with Kaiowá women, young people, children and elders occupying and living in the place. Two shots of a cross (one closed and, maintaining continuity, the other open), where the murdered 15-year-old lies, inscribe the space marked by life and death in the filmic materiality. In the film Vida e Luta na Retomada Tei’ykue (2018), violence against indigenous communities is materialized in the image of a doll suspended from a tree, with a noose around its neck simulating a hanging. She is an emblematic figure of the indigenous issue in Brazil who, from a zoom that suddenly opens, framed by smoke in the background, introduces the scenario of the Guarani and Kaiowá historical experience: mortal, flesh and blood, taken by the obscurity of life. Reports and gestures from the leaders follow, with recurring expressions about who the territory really belongs to and hands on the ground, dragging and holding back the sand, trying to retain the land that slips through their fingers. It culminates, between one segment and the next, with a scene of resistance by a Kaiowá man who, in front of a group of relatives in front of the camera, says that, “even buried, his bones will speak for the land”!

From the Kaiowá traditions (Mokõi Kovoé, 2021), to the Terena traditions reclaimed by the new generations (Kipaexoti, 2020), to the records of the Project for Territorial and Environmental Management in Indigenous Lands (GATI: Intercâmbio Aldeia Pirakuá/MS, 2014), the reclaiming films appear as one of the forms of ASCURI’s cinema: with the subjects of the experience constituting themselves as agents of audiovisual production and history.

They move not at a later time, in the field of representation alone, when cinema only revisits the past, but within the documentary record, inside history and simultaneously with the events. Based on counter-information operations (Brenez, 2017), which open up as a laboratory for the creation of forms of discourse, articulating fact and what is proper to art, representation and action, ASCURI’s reclaiming films converge cinema and history in the fight against systems of power (agribusiness in Mato Grosso, the local media and political complex), finding the voice of the Other and intercepting the mechanisms of official truths in national society. In the documentary Yvy Reñoi, Semente da terra (2018), the lens of the indigenous filmmakers witnesses the attack by farmers’ militias on the Retaking of Tei’ykue, in Caraapó/MS, in 2016. Between immediate recordings and revisiting the facts in the heat of the moment, the instability of the frame, the blurred shots, the irregular angles, the sudden movements and the vagueness of the images, permeate the narrative materiality and the making of the document incorporate the ebullience of the Guarani Kaiowá world. In this indigenous imagery regime, the experience of the violence of the world is revealed in the imperfection of the filmic re-working of events, without which the documentary footage, which takes place between life and death, would be meaningless. It draws on other ASCURI films and sequences in the same serial flow of hands on the land and the expression “This land is ours!”.

Counter-information films, as outlined by Brenez (2017, p. 217), figure:

- a relationship of immediacy in the present of events and struggles that translates into a call to action; - the documentation of a fact or a situation that is not dealt with / concealed / falsified by the dominant media; - the expression of a critical point of view that is not represented in the dominant media; - an in situ reflection on the role of images and representations in history; - a work that takes place over time and manifests itself in serial forms.

Like the Guajajara field and ante-field, the Guarani and Kaiowá experience, reworked by ASCURI, is tensioned through a variety of formats and ways of presenting reality, with all the scars and erasures of documentary recording. In this movement of counter-information, restoring other versions of the story about the four hours of attacks on the ancestral territory, Yvy Reñoi - Semente da terra revisits the events that culminated in the murder of health worker Clodiodi Aquileu Rodrigues de Souza, with numerous teachers injured and a 10-year-old child shot in the stomach. Beginning with the framing of internet images of then Federal Deputy Jair Bolsonaro, in 2016, at an airport in Campo Grande/MS, promising to respond with bullets to farm invasions, ASCURI’s cinema does not bow to the document, but (re)invents forms that enhance the world it presents: interspersing cell phone images and elaborate plans; retrieving archives and the re-enactment of events; criticism of the official media, underlined with the uniqueness of the Kaiowá and Guarani ways of being. In this movement, the editing alternates the capturing of the events with the testimonies of the leaders in a process of continuity between the plans of the agribusiness militias and the accounts from the battlefield which, taken after the fact, seem as if they were lived when filmed. The temperature rises when Mc Marechal’s rap Guerra comes on, punctuating the images of burnt-out motorcycles and cars, police patrols roaming the territory, snipers on pick-up trucks, the flickering of the camera, the smoke dripping across the scorched landscape, a leader confronting police officers, bullet marks on the bodies of young indigenous people, the funeral of Clodiodi Aquileu, the film crew in the field, faces and bodies, sometimes covered, the maraca of the old Guarani and Kaiowá mobilizing the cosmos and the spirits.

In the poetics of Vídeo nas Aldeias, unlike the metafilmic dimension of ASCURI, the constitution of the Other, at the center of the documentary scene, shifts to the force field that is installed behind and in front of the camera, when, between directors and characters, the Other seeks to direct them, ultimately, based on their history and worldview.

Image 8
A morada de Hakowo (2017) - Dir. Vincent Carelli. Source: Saci Filmes.

A morada de Hakowo (2017), by Vincent Carelli and Wewito Piyãko, brings up other questions and is emblematic of the limits and possibilities surrounding the constitution of the subject in indigenous documentary cinema. In this film, the act of always turning to oneself - in each segment - makes this documentary a space in which multiple problems of the subject of the camera are installed, with uninterrupted and varied frictions between mise en scène and self-mise en scène. It is precisely because here the subjects are constituted in front of the camera handled by the Other and by themselves, which puts us at the center of the question that - in many cases - dominates documentary film: “How can we film the other without dominating or reducing them?” (Comolli, 2008, p. 30). When Carelli/Piyãko make space for the old Ashaninka in front of their lenses, moving between the village and the city, a force field is set up between the directors and Hakowo, from the Kampa Indigenous Land of the Amônia River, located in Acre/AC), or, in the view of Antonio Bispo dos Santos (2023), where the state of Acre is located. In each segment, disorganizing the domains of power in the cinema, as we have already pointed out, Hakowo continually tries to direct himself and modulate the scene from his perspective. Despite Hakowo’s centrality in the film field, his place is controlled by the direction and editing, which (re)define in post-production the condition of the historical agents in the frame.

This is because what and how should appear in the image is part of the act of filmmaking, and in A morada de Hakowo this dimension becomes more complex because the Other (not just the person being filmed, framed by the camera and led through the time and space of the village) also belongs to the antechamber. In this sense, alongside Vincent (the nonindigenous gaze of the documentary scene), director Wewito Piyãko Ashaninka “strips” Hakowo who, with his self-mise en scène, tries in vain to control the camera that captures him” (Felipe, 2020a). Wewito’s presence in the frame, in the filmic and historical field, accompanying Hakowo at all times, is very strong. From the beginning to the end of the documentary, as a conductor - who listens, responds and dialogues with his character - he makes present the power relationship between those filming and those being filmed, regardless of the otherness shared. At one point, in the center of the Ashaninka community, Hakowo meets several relatives and expresses, with a certain good humor, that he is more like a prisoner being followed, from whose bonds he has no way out. Between one segment and another, with the various surrounding worlds being incorporated by that original community, the lenses of Vincent Carelli and Weiwito Piyãnko seem to move through a paradoxical materiality, since the film that we don’t see, in frame, is all the time announced by the character, in what he considers should be recorded in image: teaching his children, his wife making handicrafts, preparing the environment for recording.

A morada de Hakowo is a production of the television series Nokun Txai, Nossos Txais, which, produced by Saci Filmes, under the overall coordination of Sérgio Carvalho, has 13 episodes that map the history, knowledge and cultural manifestations of the indigenous peoples from Acre. Between the history of oppression (with the sale of women and children), the communal ways (cutting down the palm grove, capturing scenes with the family, preparing caiçuma) and the uniqueness of the ways of life and ancestral knowledge (around Ayahuasca, coca and the ancient shamans), as a product for TV, now part of Prime Vídeo’s collection, the project does not escape the ethnographic claims that the representation of the indigenous world can sell as an object. Between one segment and another, the elements of the diacriticism of an ancient people inevitably stand out, with their baskets being made, drums being mobilized and props emerging from the Ashaninkas’ bodies and faces for the camera to record. While, by turning in on itself in a game of reflexivity, the film reflects on the film itself, in A morada de Hakowo, self-referentiality reveals the realms of power with and from the Other. In this case, paradoxically, in a situation of sharing, the boundaries between authorship dissolve, and we don’t know for sure who is or isn’t in charge of the staging.

These segments that we revisit, once again, invoke the power relations of documentaries, because, in line with Marcius Freire (2011), we feel that those who hold the camera exert an enormous dominance over those they film, although this is not without counterpoints, especially because, before considering the passivity of bodies, what is presented is an agency body, based on a process of “capture and resistance, exchange and negotiation.” (Guimarães, 2012, p. 60).

Part 4 - Other windows open

Drawing on Comolli (2008), we conclude that, within the limits of the indigenous documentary scene, the desire to get closer to the subjects being filmed also governs the counter-colonial camera, which is not guided solely by the order of the gaze. At the same time, it incorporates “situations that demand new places of enunciation, other points of view, interferences and positions.” [...] (Teixeira, 2012, p. 255)¹⁸. In this context, the shared mode of audiovisual production and the open space for the self-mise scène of the Other take center stage, albeit with the constitutive frictions of the documentary scene in terms of its (im)possibilities regarding the place of subjects in cinema. In his critique of films that claim to “give voice to the other” as a liberating act, Teixeira (2012, p. 252, 253) points out that this act, which supposedly transfers the status of the subject, clashes with a fundamental question: after all, “Who is the owner of the discourse?” - and then in the “unchanged identity [of the filmmaker] as the articulator” of the enunciation which, from start to finish, is consented to and does not result from a transgression by the historical agents. In this sense, the act of giving voice in documentary cinema is always subject to annulment, which applies to certain post-colonial cinemas, classic ethnographic films and hegemonic industrial cinema. Despite the relevance of this analysis, Teixeira (2012) was unaware of original cinematographies, whose agents occupy the field, the extra-field and the ante-field of images, the latter two being intrinsic and coextensive with the former (Brasil, 2012)¹⁹.

As we have pointed out elsewhere, those who film, what they film and who is filmed - the three dimensions of the reverse filmic pragmatics of indigenous cinema - belong to the same documentary locus (Felipe, 2023). Therein, an issue arises, because when the mirrors are reversed, the subjectobject relationship is reversed (?), because now the domains of the plane of enunciation and, by extension, the relationships between the agents of/in the documentary film - of indigenous origin - take on new and different contours. Therefore, as an inevitable consequence, the question arises as to whether it is possible to think of indigenous cinema as dissociated from power relations, without the irreversible changes to the places of enunciation and the repositioning of historical agents in relation to the camera complex. Consequently, according to Jean-Claude Bernardet (2011), who thought of indigenous cinema as a philosophy of alterity, the questions to be asked are: who in fact is now the Other in the documentary film of indigenous origin, what frictions drive the recording, what historical world and what visions of time, space, societal structures and nature are in the frame?

The ‘other’ is always designated by a subject, who, in order to use this pronoun, has to affirm itself as a subject, as a place of speech, as a place from which vision starts. Now, the affirmation of this subject as the center is the very negation of the ‘other’, of the recognition of its existence, because it negates it as a place from which speech and vision can start. I believe that the philosophy of alterity only begins when the subject who uses the word ‘other’ accepts that they themselves are an ‘other’ if the center shifts, accepts that they are an ‘other’ for the ‘other’ (Bernardet, 2011, p. 158).

Jauará Ichê! “I am a jaguar,” said Cunhambebe to Hans Staden, who, with his Western rationalism, questioned the Tupinambá chief as he devoured a “fellow man”. But, as Felipe Guiomarino (2022, p. 151) observed, “Cunhambebe is not actually a jaguar, but, in the act of devouring, he relates to the devoured enemy in the same way (as) a jaguar would relate to its enemy”. In Tupinambá cosmology, this condition allows the Other to be experienced - while not being ... but being as the Jaguar - which doesn’t imply becoming exactly the Other, but rather placing oneself “in the manner of”, as if one were the Other (Felipe Guiomarino, 2022, p. 151). On the one hand, taking the experience of Cunhambebe as a reference, perhaps we have here a key to repositioning the problem of who the Other really is and, therefore, the subject in indigenous documentary cinema, mainly because it allows us to return to the possibilities and limits of the domains of original cinematographies, which place themselves - in the case of indigenous perspectives - in the manner of the Other in the process of film production of the historical world, allowing themselves to be incorporated by the perspective of the ancestral communities they film and by the uniqueness of their ways of living. At the same time, the Cunhambebe fact makes it possible for the issues of the indigenous historical-cosmological locus to shape the documentary scene and reposition the subjects in the films as agents in counterpoint to the ocularcentrism of modernity/coloniality, which has historically reduced them to their objectuality.

On the other hand, returning to Amerindian perspectivism with Viveiros de Castro (2017) and the studies by Brasil (2016a; 2016b) on the films Tikmũ’ũn and Yanomami, the anecdote surrounding Jauará Ichê moves us towards a discussion that can deepen the problem of the constitution of the subject in indigenous cinema: that of identifying, among, through and by means of the filmic artifacts, the cosmological dimension of the images. Above all, it can induce us to think about other categories of subject; after all, in the perspectivism of indigenous peoples, Western multiculturalism gives way to an Amerindian multinaturalism and, consequently, to a myriad of other interceding subjects. This allows us to enter the original documentary multi-epistemic scene and understand how, in their own terms, indigenous filmmakers (re)work the historical experience of the world. Methodologically, it is necessary to distinguish the indigenous perspectives in cinema, which necessarily establish different relationships with the cosmological dimension, starting from - excuse the inappropriate expression - the Other: which is (re)worked when species of all kinds meet²⁰. It also allows us to think about other forms of the indigenous documentary scene as a counterpoint to the hegemonic anthropocentric view, in the sense used, in the theatrical context, by Maria Clara Ferrer (2017): a perspective that is commensurable to man, in which he is the unit, the center and the scale of measurement and whose actions impose a way of reading what is visible, always in a causal logic.

Availability of research data:

the dataset supporting the results of this study is published in this article.

• This original paper, translated by Tony O’Sullivan, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.

Notes

• 1
  In another study, we analyze Serras da Desordem, which, in Martírio (2016, by Vincent Carelli, Ernesto de Carvalho and Tatiana Almeida), comprises a diptych on the indigenous question in Brazil (Felipe, 2018; 2020a).
• 2
  Robert Flaherty, in Nanook of the North (1922), inaugurates the documentary as language.
• 3
  Bernardet (2003) has a seminal book on the representation of the people in Brazilian documentaries, analyzing how social actors were reduced to general categories by the sociological model and, conversely, how filmmakers tried to alleviate this reduction, sometimes transferring the camera to the class Other.
• 4
  We had already emphasized this Context post-Vídeo nas Aldeias on another occasion (Felipe, 2020a).
• 5
  After, the young adult Kaiowá Ademilson “Kiki” Concianza joined the group.
• 6
  The Trilogia da Intervenção was shown at the 25th Edition of forumdoc.bh - Documentary and Ethnographic Film Festival, whose politics of images from the Karrabing Collective is introduced by Maia and Romero (2021) in the show catalogue that includes other texts and essays.
• 7
  “[...] awareness, which enables them to be part of the historical process as a subject, avoids fanaticism and sets them on a quest for affirmation” (Freire, 2016, p. 54).
• 8
  As Brasil wrote (2012, p. 103): “The one who has always been the object of the gaze is now firmly looking at the gaze of which he was the object. As if the camera were a 'hinge', returning the gaze to the one who had become accustomed to being the subject of the point of view (and rarely its object)”.
• 9
  Guimarães and Flores use the term counter-colonizing aesthetics in their anal-ysis of Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro (1974-1982), by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, which is fundamental to our reflections on Huni Kuin counter-colonial cinema (Felipe, 2022).
• 10
  A point we've already made elsewhere (Felipe, 2022).
• 11
  To better understand periphery cinema, see Prysthon (2006).
• 12
  As we then reflected on Antonio Bispo dos Santos (2023), although influenced by decolonialists (Mignolo, 2017). In a previous study, he had written "greater decoloniality” (Felipe, 2020a).
• 13
  We used post-colonial criticism - with a decolonial tendency - to study the counter-narratives of the Guarani Mbya Cinema Collective. (Felipe, 2019b; 2020a).
• 14
  As we analyzed in our study on the cinema-caracol of director Misak Luis Tróchez Tunubalá, from the Colombian Cauca, based on the centrality of the body as a counterpoint to the marks of coloniality of national society on what should or should not be considered indigenous (Felipe, 2020b).
• 15
  Created in 2009, the Yamurikumã Association of Xinguan Women is made up of indigenous women from communities in the Xingu Park, focusing on women's demands and the cultural strengthening of the Xinguan peoples, especially women's participation in sustainability policies and other spaces, with a view to guaranteeing their fundamental rights.
• 16
  See our study on the counter colonial cinema of the Huni kuin (Felipe, 2022).
• 17
  Directed by Ariel Ortega, Patrícia Ferreira, Vincent Carelli and Ernesto de Carvalho.
• 18
  Teixeira (2012) reflects here on the figure of the documentarian in relation to the Outro, when, without accepting the rigidity of the places that commonly identify them, they reinvent themselves and the film.
• 19
  See Brasil (2012) to understand para compreender a complexity of the inter-twining of field, ante-field and extra-field.
• 20
  In other studies, we have already seen the Mapuche and Misak worldviews in cinema (Felipe, 2020b; 2021).

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Editor in charge: Fabiana de Amorim Marcello

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  31 July 2023
• Accepted
  16 Aug 2023