Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / South America / Colombia / All Films

Riada

Sun, 1 Dec 2024 16:48:23 GMT

In 2018, Colombia's second most powerful waterway was stopped because of a controversial infrastructure project: the Hidroituango dam. Once completed, this massive hydropower project is projected to provide for 20% of the country’s energy needs. Yet, the social and environmental impacts are perhaps equivalent in scale to the dam’s colossal size. Already the area's inhabitants have suffered forced displacement, massacres, and systematic persecution, along with a permanent alteration in their ways of living.

Riada is an ethnographic inquiry into the impacts of this infrastructure project. The film’s poetic construction brings to life the river and the communities who have waged a thirty year battle to preserve their way of life. The film takes viewers through the river waterways in the Hidroituango dam's influence area to meet peasants, gold panners, fishermen, and scientists. Finished on the verge of the dam's inauguration date, this 100-minute journey poetically connects the survivor's raw oral stories and the harrowing landscape in three acts: swirls, debris, and mutations.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

25th Bogota Int'l Documentary Showcase (MIDBO), Colombia 2024

19th Galician Ethnographic Film Showcase (MICE), Spain 2024

Latin American Anthropology Film Festival (ALA), Argentina 2024

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Ika Hands

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:44:00 GMT

Ika Hands
Buy Now: $320.00

This 2008 Special Edition DVD includes:

The film Ika Hands (58 minutes)
A conversation with Octavio Paz (27 minutes)
Photo gallery featuring still images and journal entries read by Robert Gardner (14 minutes)

About the film:
In the highlands of Northern Colombia, the Ika live a strenuous and isolated life, economically dependent on small gardens and a handful of domestic animals. They are thought to be descendants of the Maya who fled from the turmoil of Central American High Civilization's warring states to the remote valleys of Colombia's Sierra Nevadas. The Ika still inhabit a spectacular but demanding terrain extending between five and fifteen thousand feet, an almost vertical geography through which they move with prodigious ease.

Their lives are filled with a multitude of tasks, which they perform with a rare dexterity and purpose. Their labors, though they belong to two quite separate realms - the practical and the spiritual - contribute equally to the well being of everyone. Both days and nights are long and arduous. Indeed, the central figure in Ika Hands, Mama Marco, is a man whose priestly calling is simply another career undertaken in addition to that of farmer and householder.

Ika society is the result of quite distinct cultural choices, of what seem to have been decisions by generations of individuals to persevere with tradition and to resist the compelling alternatives offered by a ubiquitous modernity.

About the conversation with Octavio Paz:
On Jan. 19, 1983, Robert Gardner was in Octavio Paz's library on the Paseo de la Reforma to talk about film and anthropology. With them was Robert Fulton who had come with Gardner to work on a long neglected film about Paz himself, a film that never materialized but of which this occasion and several other such scenes remain.

At this moment, Gardner was finishing Ika Hands. He wanted it to be about shamanism or at least the kind of magical practices for which the Ika were known. Going to Mexico to visit Paz was in tune with his belief in Paz as a person closer to being a shaman himself than anyone else he knew.

The idea was to invite Paz into the Ika world and also into his own concerns about how to represent that world: what can images tell us? Gardner hoped to do this by showing Paz parts of an early version of the film he was editing. The ensuing twenty odd minutes is the result of that experiment.

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New World Monkeys

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:11:00 GMT

New World Monkeys
Buy Now: $320.00

This program is designed to introduce Primatology students to the range of monkeys of the Super family Ceboidea originating from Central and South America. Material on twenty -two species is included, covering all five of the families recently defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Some material was taped in the wild, while other species were observed in semi-free ranging and caged locations. The program begins with a brief introduction of the five families and then shows the field location in Costa Rica where some material was gathered. Morphological traits distinguishing New World from Old world forms are indicated throughout the first few segments. Short clips of marmoset and tamarin species cover a variety of forms while more in-depth segments on other species allow students access to different levels of information. In this video we are provided with a wealth of information about size, habitat, range, sexual dimorphism, diet, and communication patterns of each species. There is also footage of mother/infant interaction and adult social relations. Some maps and diagrams are included to inhance understanding of particular topics. A self-guide study sheet is included. This program is suitable for both introductory level and as a focus for discussion by more advanced students.

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Owners of the Water ("ö Tede'wa")

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

Owners of the Water ("ö Tede'wa")
Buy Now: $295.00

A unique collaboration between two indigenous filmmakers and an anthropologist, Owners of the Water is a compelling documentary with groundbreaking ethnographic imagery. A central Brazilian Xavante, a Wayuu from Venezuela, and a US anthropologist explore an indigenous campaign to protect a river from devastating effects of uncontrolled Amazonian soy cultivation. Xavante and Wayuu are nationally and internationally prominent political actors and both face challenges over water.

Owners highlights a civic protest showing strategic use of culture to bring attention to deforestation and excessive use of agritoxins in unregulated soy cultivation. The film features a diversity of Xavante opinions and evidence that non-indigenous members of the local population both support and oppose indigenous demands. The film showcases indigenous efforts to build networks among different native peoples and across nations.

The film results from long collaboration between anthropologist Laura Graham and Xavante and more recent collaboration with Wayuu. The Association Xavante Warã, a Xavante organization that promotes indigenous knowledge and ways of living in the central Brazilian cerrado (a spiritually and materially integrated space that Xavante know as 'ro) and conservation of this unique environment, invited Graham to tell the story of its campaign to save the Rio das Mortes. David Hernández Palmar, a Wayuu (Iipuana clan) from Venezuela, accompanied Graham to meet the Xavante and learn about their struggles over water. After the trip the Xavante and Wayuu filmmakers and the anthropologist made this film based on the ethnographic footage of their intercultural encounters.

“…the scope of Owners of the Water goes well beyond the somewhat narrow focus of past documentaries, exposing the viewer to a diversity of facts, images and viewpoints. Owners of the Water deserves credit for tracing cutting edge indigenous issues in the Amazon.”
— Jonathan C. Bergman, Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources

“Owners of the Water will be of interest to professors teaching courses on the indigenous peoples of Latin America as well as on the anthropology of protest movements, applied anthropology, and ecological anthropology. Visual anthropologists will find that it is a useful model for incorporating the voices and the aesthetics of the people with whom we work, both in front of and behind the camera… This film could serve as an inspiration to indigenous communities across Brazil and the wider world to use digital technologies in the struggle to maintain the ecosystems on which they depend.” —
Brian Brazeal, American Anthropologist, Vol. 114, No. 1

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

International Meeting of the Latin American Sociology Association, Brazil 2011

Honorable Mention Award for Advocacy, Montana CINE International Film Festival, 2011

Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2010

Bioneers Moving Image Festival, New Mexico, 2010

American Anthropological Association/Society for Visual Anthropology Conference, New Orleans, LA, 2010

International Unseen Film "Filme Sozialak"" Festival, Bilbao, Spain, 2010

"Visual Representation of Crisis through Ethnographic Film," EASA Biennial Conference, Ireland, 2010

Contro-Sguardi: International Anthropological Film Festival, Perugia, Italy, 2010

Honorable Mention - Best Environmental Documentary, XXVII Festival de Cine de Bogotá, Colombia, 2010

Disclaimer on Naming:
Please be aware that this documentary may include outdated or potentially offensive language. Such terms are not endorsed by DER but are presented in their original context to promote awareness, education, and discussion. Learn more about DER’s efforts to use reparative language and honor the preferred names of Indigenous communities by clicking here.

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