Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

ARGENTINA: Bringing Films and Filmmaking to Indigenous Communities

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 15 2008 (IPS) - With the assistance of experts from Bolivia, indigenous communities in the northeastern Argentine province of Chaco are learning how to make films, as a means of helping the rest of the world understand their way of life and the problems they face.

“Just as indigenous people once adopted writing, which allowed others to get to know us, we now want to make use of this new tool to help people learn about us,” Juan Chico, a historian from the Qom (Toba) indigenous community in Chaco, told IPS.

“Whites tend to show images that cast us in a negative light,” said Chico, who took part in a recent workshop for indigenous people interested in learning about filmmaking. “For example, in the Chaco provincial government building, there are photos of malnourished indigenous people taken without the subject’s permission. Perhaps the aim is to awaken pity. But no one ever shows that there also excellent writers, musicians and artists among us.”

The idea arose this year in the Under-Secretariat of Culture in Chaco, one of Argentina’s poorest provinces. The provincial population of around one million people includes 60,000 members of the Qom, Mocoví and Wichí indigenous groups, who have their own leaders and institutions that represent them.

Most of the population of northern Argentina is “mestizo” – of mixed European and indigenous origin.

According to the last national census, some 600,000 people in this country of nearly 38 million identified themselves as belonging to indigenous groups. However, a much larger proportion is mestizo.

“Indigenous people in Chaco province have always been neglected, and many are living in critical conditions,” said Marcelo Pérez, who heads the recently created department of films and audiovisual productions (DECEA), set up to promote filmmaking and access to films in the province.

Pérez told IPS that representatives of the indigenous communities themselves requested that films be shown in their villages and towns, where there are no cinemas, and that people in the communities be taught filmmaking techniques.

That gave rise to the first indigenous filmmaking festival in August, a unique experience in which mobile broadcasting units toured 6,500 km in three days.

“It was a mobile film festival,” said Pérez. “We brought films to around 40 villages through the mobile film arrangement that already existed in the province, but we only showed films made by indigenous people or on indigenous issues, from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Venezuela.”

The response from the public was “very strong,” he said. After each of the showings, which were often held outdoors, discussions were led by bilingual teachers who approached DECEA to offer their services.

The interest in learning how to operate video cameras arose in the post-film discussions.

But traditional teaching methods were not used. “We did not want to introduce the ‘virus’ of ‘transculturisation’, which is why we turned to CEFREC,” said Pérez, referring to a filmmaking centre in Bolivia, which for two decades has been providing indigenous people with training in producing videos and films.

In a country like Bolivia, where a majority of the population is indigenous, CEFREC’s aim is to provide native communities with tools to actively participate in the creation of audiovisual productions that counteract the dominant media messages.

CEFREC gave an intensive three-day introductory course to 25 young people from indigenous communities in Chaco province. A second 14-day training course will be held in February, in the town of Villa Bermejito, and a third course will be offered at an unspecified date.

Milton Guzmán, with CEFREC, gave the workshop. “The ancestral cultures of the Americas have been maintained by means of their oral culture,” he told the participants.

“Now it is time to adopt the audiovisual culture, and to make it a tool to show the world that in the Americas there are ancestral cultures, identity and knowledge,” he said.

The young people taking part in the course worked day and night on 65 filmmaking exercises, which included narration techniques.

“They are interested in showing the plight of pregnant teenagers, for example. They want to film the protest marches and struggles for their rights, or to simply film a conversation with a grandparent. The issues are broad, and the productions will never be the same as they would be if they were filmed by a white person, because these youngsters see things differently,” said Pérez.