In a scene from Teko Haxy – Ser imperfeita (Teko Haxy – Being imperfect; 2018), produced by Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy of the Mbyá Guaraní ethnic group and non-Indigenous Sophia Pinheiro, Yxapy says: “I think you [white people] didn’t want us to exist.” In the film, which serves as a sort of collective daily diary, women talk about their memories, anxieties, and everyday issues, like preparing a chicken or dealing with pain. “These women’s narratives usually come from a very intimate place, and cinema works like a basket to store what is later shared,” says Pinheiro, a professor at the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP) in São Paulo. “Through audiovisual language, they can tell their own stories.”
For her master’s degree in anthropology, defended at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) in 2015, Pinheiro studied Ferreira’s career. She found that female authorship is still being erased due to sexism in the villages and beyond. During her PhD in cinema at Fluminense Federal University (UFF), completed in 2023, she deepened her research. In addition to Ferreira, she also studied the film production of Flor de María Alvarez Medrano, who is a Mayan from Guatemala, and Graciela Guarani, of the Guarani-Kaiowá ethnic group in Mato Grosso do Sul. Last year, Pinheiro helped create the Katahirine Audiovisual Network for Indigenous Women, which seeks to discover and disseminate Indigenous art by women in Brazil and foster new partnerships. The idea was conceived by non-Indigenous filmmaker Mari Corrêa from the Catitu Institute in São Paulo, who manages the network with Pinheiro and journalist and filmmaker Helena Corezomaé, of the Umutina ethnic group.
There are currently 67 filmmakers involved in the network, representing 33 ethnic groups from across the country, in addition to six Indigenous advisors, such as Ferreira. She has codirected five films, including, Bicicletas de Nhanderu (Nhanderu bicycles; 2011), which she made together with her partner, the director Ariel Karay Ortega, also of the Mbyá Guaraní people in Rio Grande do Sul. She also contributed as a screenwriter to the feature film Canuto’s Transformation (2023), directed by Ortega and non-Indigenous anthropologist Ernesto de Carvalho. At the end of last year, it won best film and outstanding artistic contribution in the Envision competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in the Netherlands.
The film portrays a story told by elders of a Mbyá Guaraní village on the border between Brazil and Argentina, about a man who turns into a jaguar and tragically dies. “It combines fictional and documentary elements, with its process of creation made explicit in the narrative,” explains André Guimarães Brasil, a professor of cinema at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and scholar of Indigenous audiovisual poetics. In April, he was one of the film’s debaters at UFMG’s 10th Colloquium on Cinema, Aesthetics, and Politics.
According to Brasil, cinematic production by Indigenous filmmakers has been growing in the country in recent years. “As a result of affirmative action policies, for example, more Indigenous people have graduated from Brazilian universities, with a growing interest in cinema and audiovisual media. Several of them are already hosting workshops in this field,” he says. One of them is Guarani filmmaker and educator Alberto Alvares Tupã Ra’y, who earned a degree in intercultural training for Indigenous educators from UFMG’s School of Education in 2009. “I travel around several territories, all over the country, to give workshops to other Indigenous people,” says Alvares.
Throughout the course of his 11-year career, the filmmaker estimates he has directed around 20 films. In his master’s research into cinema and audiovisual communication, which he defended at UFF in 2021, he reflected on filmmaking “on the border between Guarani and non-Guarani knowledge” by examining the raw archives of two of his feature films: Guardiões da memória (Guardians of memory; 2018) and O último sonho (The last dream; 2019). “We, the Guarani, are an oral people. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We are constantly being penned in. A film can therefore be a guardian of the memories of our elderly, a way of sharing this knowledge and preserving our tradition,” says Alvares.
His most recent feature film, Yvy Pyte – Coração da Terra (Heart of the Earth; 2023), was screened this year at the opening of the forum.doc Documentary and Ethnography Film Festival in Belo Horizonte and at the 27th Tiradentes Film Festival, both in Minas Gerais. “Today, we have specialist and nonspecialist exhibitions and festivals that screen, award, and discuss films made by Indigenous people,” says UFMG’s Brasil. “This is increasing interest in the topic at universities and encouraging research.”
The audiovisual art that has come to be known as “Indigenous cinema” encompasses films of this type made in partnership with non-Indigenous directors, in addition to ethnographic productions, generally led by visual anthropologists or researchers in related fields. American film theorist Robert Stam of New York University, USA, believes Brazilian Indigenous people now make use of a wide range of media and formats, ranging from YouTube clips to video performances, shown in museums, galleries, and exhibitions. “Indigenous audiovisual activism in Brazil has been boosted by the internet,” he says. “One of the concepts I describe in my research is the ‘technicalized Indian [sic],’ proposed by the modernist Oswald de Andrade [1890–1954] in opposition to the prejudiced idea that Indigenous people who make use of technology are no longer Indigenous. Indigenous people have never stopped creating and absorbing technology.”
Scene from Guardiões da memória (Guardians of memory; 2018), by Indigenous filmmaker, educator, and researcher Alberto Alvares Tupã Ra’yAlberto Alvares Tupã Ra’y
In 2023, Stam released the book Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transnational Imaginaries, Media Aesthetics, and Social Thought (Bloomsbury Academic), one chapter of which addresses the representation of Indigenous people in Brazilian cinema since the silent film era. According to the scholar, the topic has been present in Brazilian audiovisual production since the 1910s. Examples of this include the documentaries directed by Luiz Thomaz Reis (1878–1940) and expedition cameraman Marshal Cândido Rondon (1865–1958), from what was then known as the Indian Protection Service (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 255). A few years later came the feature films of filmmaker Humberto Mauro (1897–1983), such as Descobrimento do Brasil (Discovery of Brazil; 1937), which romanticizes the Portuguese colonizers. According to Stam, the representation of Indigenous groups and subjects in these films and many later ones fluctuated between the “good savages,” the passive and submissive, and the “bad guys” who opposed white domination.
The first examples of Indigenous self-representation in Brazil only emerged at the end of the twentieth century. This was when audiovisual training workshops for Indigenous people first began to appear, driven by two new developments: VHS technology and portable filming equipment. One example is Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages), an independent project created in 1986 by French-Brazilian filmmaker and Indigenous activist Vincent Carelli. Initially, the idea was for the team to make and screen films in villages, while incorporating the community’s suggestions into the material. However, from 1997 onwards, the initiative — which is still active today — began offering workshops to teach Indigenous people how to direct their own films.
“Video in the Villages contributed to the formulation of public policies for audiovisual production in small villages. At the end of the 2000s, the team behind the project participated in the development of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture’s Indigenous Culture Points program, which in 2015 began awarding audiovisual initiatives,” says Bernard Belisário, from the Center for Training in Arts and Communication at the Federal University of Southern Bahia (UFSB), who has been working on the project since 2011. “Another legacy is a collection of films created over the years, which is now beginning to be made available to the communities in these villages.”
A screening in the village of Enawenê Nawê of images recorded in the 1980s and 1990sVincent Carelli
During his master’s degree, completed at UFMG in 2014, Belisário analyzed the film As hiper mulheres (The hyper women; 2011), directed by Takumã Kuikuro, of the Kuikuro ethnic group, who was trained by the Video in the Villages project and worked in partnership with non-Indigenous filmmakers Carlos Fausto and Leonardo Sette. For his PhD, defended at the same institution in 2018, he studied the audiovisual production of director Divino Tserewahú, from the Xavante ethnic group, who also attended Video in the Villages workshops. His research resulted in the film Waia rini (2015), directed by Tserewahú and Belisário.
Demands for land and rights have been a strong motivation for the audiovisual work of Indigenous people, says Ana Lúcia Ferraz, a professor of anthropology at UFF and head of the university’s Ethnographic Film Laboratory. Ferraz has personal experience in audiovisual ethnography, having made a documentary with a Mbyá Guaraní group who left Paraty to settle in Maricá, both towns in Rio de Janeiro State. The collaboration resulted in the 2014 creation of a university extension program in audiovisual processes for people from the Mbyá Guaraní ethnic group in Rio de Janeiro and the Kaiowá and Nhandeva peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul.
Later, Ferraz began accompanying the Nhandeva from the Potrero Guaçu Indigenous Reserve in a process of reclaiming their territory and recovering their own knowledge. Together, they have produced one film called Nhande ywy, nosso território (Nhande ywy, our territory; 2018) and are currently finishing a feature-length film. Ferraz is also filming with another group from Mato Grosso — the Xavante — whose territory is being threatened by the construction of four hydroelectric plants on the Mortes River.
Frames from the film Canuto’s Transformation (2023), by Ariel Karay Ortega and Ernesto de CarvalhoErnesto de Carvalho
She was also a professor of the postgraduate course Indigenous Cinema: From the Territory to the Screen, taught at the Center for Studies on Diversity, Intolerance, and Conflicts at the University of São Paulo (Diversitas-USP) in 2022 and 2023. According to the professor, the course is set to return next year. On the course, master’s and PhD students at the university, Indigenous or otherwise, make their own videos in partnership with Indigenous communities. The three documentaries produced so far, such as Fora do lugar (Out of place), were exhibited at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in the city of São Paulo in June.
Made in close partnership with village elders and spiritual leaders, the Indigenous films reflect the importance of listening: they are not made without consultation and dialogue. “Every time I produce a film, I talk to the communities in question to find out what kind of feeling they want to capture in this world of images,” says Alvares. This is also a key concern for anthropologist and filmmaker Alice Villela, from the School of Education at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Between 2006 and 2015, she researched the production and reception of films among the Asurini people of Xingu, Pará, for her master’s degree at UNICAMP and her PhD at USP. Both studies were funded by FAPESP.
In her research, Villela highlighted the importance of carefully identifying native concepts related to recorded images, as there is always the potential for misunderstanding. “This is a translation that is not just linguistic, but cosmological,” observes the scholar. “For the Asurini of Xingu, photographic and audiovisual images give rise to various interpretations. They stimulate ynga, for example, a vital principle that is a foundation of their cosmology, directly linked to the practice of shamanism.” At the same time, she notes, images can be very political: they play a role in awareness, communication, and the production of documents that support their struggle for rights.
Filming of Teko Haxy – Ser imperfeita (Teko Haxy – Being imperfect; 2018), by Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy and Sophia PinheiroHenrique Borela
Villela’s most recent audiovisual work follows the daily rituals and activities of the Sabuká Kariri-Xocó group, from the state of Alagoas, as well as how they have to move around to survive and their struggles for territory, which has been officially granted but is still subject to invasion. She first made contact with the group during her postdoctoral research, completed at USP in 2022, which was part of a thematic project funded by FAPESP called “Local composition: New paths for ethnomusicology.”
One of the outcomes of the research was Toré (2022), a film about the musical production of this Indigenous group on reclaimed land. “They want these images to be seen, because they are seeking political visibility. The reservation they live on is smaller than that of the memory of their ancestors, which they call ‘memorial territory,’” he says. Like the others, the feature film now being finalized by non-Indigenous filmmaker Hidalgo Romero also reflects a close dialogue with the community. “The spiritual leader Pawanã Crody contributed right from the initial idea of the film. He has continued to participate in the editing stage, commenting on the film and drawing attention to things that had gone unnoticed,” concludes Villela.
The story above was published with the title “On the screen” in issue 342 of august/2024.
Project
Taquaras, drums, and guitars: Relationships between music and location in the construction of audiovisual narratives (nº 17/21063-1); Grant Mechanism Postdoctoral Fellowship; Supervisor Rose Satiko Gitirana (FFLCH-USP); Beneficiary Alice Martins Villela Pinto; Investment R$431,652.32.
Scientific articles
BELISÁRIO, B. Rebobinando a fita: Arqueologia do videotape nas aldeias. GIS – Gesto, Imagem e Som – Revista de Antropologia. USP. Vol. 7, no. 1. 2022.
FERRAZ, A. L. Os cantos-dança guarani, sua territorialidade cósmica e a etnografia como antropologia modal. Proa: Revista de Antropologia e Arte. UNICAMP. Vol. 13. 2023.
Book
STAM, R. Indigeneity and the decolonizing gaze: Transnational imaginaries, media aesthetics, and social thought. London (United Kingdom): Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
