program description

What does it look like to exist fully in Latin America? The films in this program answer that question through presence and fabulation: a mother and son learning to know each other in a language of contradiction; two young Black women finding love on a soccer field; a boy whose long hair is chopped off on his first day of school; a journalist who uses her forgotten Indigenous language to uncover the media’s complicity in dispossession.

These works practice what philosopher Beatriz Nascimento called historical rescue – to revise history through the perspective of Black and colonized peoples. For many communities in Latin America, art and cinema are forms of rescuing history from ongoing colonialism by making sense of the past and are modes for world-building by reimagining tradition. This selection offers these contemporary visions by a range of cross-continental and cross-generational directors and visual artists who are Afro-diasporic and/or Indigenous from Abya Yala-Pindorama – commonly known as Latin America and the Caribbean.

Their formal choices are as wide-ranging as their geographies: hybrid languages of documentary and fiction; Indigenous science fiction set in a climate-ravaged 2084; the ancestral and the algorithmic held in the same frame. The films in the program defy the gaze of domination as they depict characters who are complex, contradictory, and embodied. They highlight the beauty of daily life, the complicated manifestations of grief, the warmth of chosen intimacy, and the reconnection with ancestral spirituality and culture.

The program includes films by Xun Sero, Johanné Gómez Terrero, Alberto Muenala, Itandehui Jansen, Edgar Sajcabún, Aldemar Matias, Vitória Liz, Letícia Batista, Monica Maria Garabito, enorê, Eleggua Luna Laverde and Sairah Choque. It spans Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil; and it speaks in Quechua, Kaqchikel, Mixtec, Tzotzil, Spanish, and Portuguese. With this combination, the program reflects the insistence of Afro-Indigenous communities to keep imagining alternative futures, anchored in their own material realities.