Earlier this month, I attended the opening gala of the aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival, the longest running Latinx film festival in Canada. [1] This year, aluCine highlighted indigenous voices from Latin America, as was apparent immediately from the opening, when an indigenous Maya woman came onto the stage to acknowledge the land on which the AGO was built. Her opening ceremony, which featured songs and ceremonies from both her own Maya people and Canada’s Anishinaabeg, was a remarkable reminder of the possibility of Pan-Americanism as seen through an indigenous lens. It was an example of how many indigenous traditions still view the Americas as a single land entity to which they have a special relationship, regardless of the imposed borders which divide countries today.
Following the opening ceremony, there was a short presentation from each of the four organizations involved in helping this opening gala take place. What emerged most strongly from their presentations was the overarching theme of birth and labour, as two of the presenters were the Toronto Birth Centre and the Midwives Collective of Toronto. These themes were immediately evident in the first short film shown, Nacimientos. This eight-minute film was selected to be shown at the 2017 Festival de Cannes and was part of a collaboration between indigenous filmmakers in Canada and Panama.[2] Shot in an experimental style, Nacimientos features three indigenous women in rural Panama who served as midwives for their communities. The women were filmed at night, with colorful images projected onto their faces, and this footage was interspersed with footage of people within the community projected onto plantain leaves. The overall effect was stunning without distracting from the stories and messages these women were trying to convey.
Thematically, what emerged was a sense of the impending loss of indigenous traditions. Each of these three aging women was the only remaining midwife in her individual community, with no one from a younger generation interested in learning about midwifery from them. This was largely due to the fact that concerns about health now tend to send most prospective indigenous mothers to a hospital instead of a traditional midwife. The film made palpable the feeling that once these older women passed away, valuable medical and cultural knowledge passed down through centuries from one midwife to the next would be lost. The screening ended on a hopeful note, however, when one of the directors who attended the festival, Analicia López, confirmed to the audience that showings of Nacimientos to the indigenous communities featured in the film has revived interest in midwifery there.
The second film featured in the opening gala was La Casa Más Grande del Mundo, an hour-long movie about an indigenous family in the Guatemalan highlands. The film functioned primarily as a coming-of-age story for a young girl, Rocio, who must herd her family’s sheep across the mountains by herself after her pregnant mother enters labour. Directed by two women, the movie featured beautiful images of the Guatemalan landscape that imbued the story with the atmosphere of a fairy tale or fable. La Casa Más Grande del Mundo simultaneously portrayed the triumph of having faced your fears and bitterness of loss and compromise. The movie highlighted the inevitability and ever present nature of birth and death, and the ways in which they instigate change and growth in life.
It is interesting to note that many of the voices on the stage and screen at the opening gala were those of women, primarily indigenous, sharing their thoughts on the significance of the process of birth. Nacimientos featured no men at all, and La Casa Más Grande del Mundo was centered on a women-only family with no husband or father. When asked about this by an audience member, the executive director of aluCine said that it was a side effect of the festival’s choice to, in 2017, give a stage to the most marginalized and least heard voices in Latin America: the voices of indigenous women. As a result of this focus, the movies featured both in the opening gala and throughout the festival seemed entirely new, sharing fresh perspectives and birthing a new, more inclusive version of cinema.
[1] http://alucinefestival.com/about/
[2] http://sub.festival-cannes.fr/SfcCatalogue/MovieDetail/e40ca222-20ef-416b-81f5-5c323a292208
Photo: Image of the aluCine Festival logo taken by the author.
About the author: Prachi Singh is a third-year student in Latin American Studies, International Relations and French Studies. Her academic interests include human rights, constitution building and law, especially as they relate to women and LBGTQ+ people worldwide.
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