As the dry season comes to an end, it’s the time of celebration and merriment in the Alto Xingu. The smell of the damp earth is mixed with the sweet perfume of pequi. But it has not always been like that: if it had not been for a death, the pequi would possibly not exist.
Linking the past to the present, Kuikuro filmmakers tell a tale of dangers and pleasures, of sex and betrayal, where men and women, hummingbirds and alligators build a shared world.
Answering a video-letter from the children from Sierra Maestra in Cuba, four Ikpeng children, filmed by videomakers from their community, introduce their village—its leaders, their friends, adult work; they show their families, their toys, their celebrations and their way of life with grace and lightheartedness – in a video letter addressed to children from other cultures they are curious to know; they ask to continue the correspondence.
In 1987, The Video in the Villages project was founded in Brazil to give indigenous people control over their own representation, and to give them the power to use the media for their goals. This video documents the process of training and the first videos made by the project’s indigenous videomakers. It also shows the national conferences where indigenous producers from the whole of Brazil met to discuss the use of video for their goals of documenting and preserving traditions, making political claims, dramatizing legends, and representing themselves to the rest of the nation. Ultimately, the project has begun a public television channel in 1995, the “Indigenous Program,” a space for indigenous people to combat the racist understandings of mainstream Brazil, an original experience for the first time on Brazilian television.