La cabeza mató a todos by Beatriz Muñoz Santiago
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the eighth edition of Art of the Real, it’s essential showcase for vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking, running from November 19-21 in New York City.
Subtitled ‘Counter Encounters' and co-curated by Colombian artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán and film programmer Rachael Rakes, this year’s program presents works by historical and contemporary filmmakers, artists, collectives, and communities, fourteen of which are of Latin American or Caribbean origin and represent seven different countries from the region including Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico. Their practices not only disturb classical ethnographic paradigms, but also reinvent an art of the real in and of itself.
Read on for the complete list of works by Latin American and Caribbean filmmakers at this year’s Art of the Real! All films will be playing in person at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center unless otherwise noted.
Program 1: ‘Acts of Refusal I’ brings together films that revolt against the assignations prescribed to regional identities and replicated throughout centuries by foreign eyes (belonging to colonizers, anthropologists, artists, tourists, politicians, and so on). Opening this section is Puerto Rican, Portuguese and Native American director Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Cowboy and “Indian” Film. In this short work, Ortiz stages destruction as an alchemical process. Originating from the shaman-like act of chopping up Anthony Mann’s 1950 western Winchester ’73 with a tomahawk, Cowboy and “Indian” Film constitutes an exhilarating manifesto against cinematic alienation.
Filmmaker Huertas Millán follows with her film Journey to a land otherwise known: a surrealist ethnography of the so-called New World, Journey to a land otherwise known interweaves the words of European travelers during America’s colonization with lush recordings of a tropical greenhouse in France. Part of a series exploring exoticism, and haunted by masked figures, the film evokes Latin-American tropicalist movements. Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak will present his Speech at the Constituent Assembly, Brasilia, a four-minute recording which depicts an iconic moment in Latin American history in which Krenak covered his face with black jenipapo paint at the National Constituent Assembly, in defense of the constitutional amendment for the Union of Indigenous Nations. Beyond the content of the speech, this is a powerful performative act blurring the lines between aesthetics and politics.
The final Latin American film in Program I is from Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s La cabeza mató a todos, an 8-minute piece where activist and botanist Mapenzi Chibale Nonó casts a magic spell to destroy military industries. Introduced by a clairvoyant cat, the film achieves a feverish nocturnal dance, invoking the memory of anti-colonial Caribbean resistance. As seen here, the works in Program I: ‘Acts of Refusal I’ are a testament to a lasting and still ongoing anti-colonial resistance. Through elements like makeup, costumes, reenactments, staged political speeches, and other détournements, they aim to reclaim accessibility and agency for a cinema of one’s own, giving form to incisive manifestos and statements of resistance and struggle.
Program 2: Acts of Refusal II: The Persistence of Invisible Traces unites works that engage with an inward exploration, employing the intimacy of a subjective first-person address to reckon with an environment devastated by colonialism and its consequences. Chilean director Jeannette Muñoz opens the program with her film Strata of Natural History, in which she double exposes photographs of Kawéskar natives in 1881 Berlin and views of the city’s Zoological Garden in 2011, recalling the forgotten history of human zoos present throughout Europe until the mid–20th century.
While loss and exile are predominant themes of this program, each artist conceives a singular space for remembrance, where opacity, embodied gestures, and a trace can create a radiant force. Colombian director Carlos Motta’s Nefandus awakens the memory of pre-Columbian nonbinary sexualities, heavily repressed and destroyed by the Spanish conquest. Intertwining Arregoces Coronado’s voice in Kogi and the filmmaker’s in Spanish, the film becomes a sensual record of heretofore undocumented desires. In Peruvian filmmaker Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s La huella, the voices of a forensic doctor and the filmmaker herself accompany a photographic archive gathered by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, documenting atrocities committed during that nation’s civil war from 1980 to 2000. And lastly, in Alexandra Cuesta’s Ecuadorian 2013 film Farewell, Mapkaulu Roger Nduku’s voice infuses Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights, a neighborhood historically built by diasporic communities and immigration, today subject to gentrification.
Program 3: What We See Is Real brings forward works that push the premise of auto-ethnography into a rigorous, foreign, and experimental art form. The section presents a second film from Chilean filmmaker Jeannette Muñoz, Puchuncaví. A study of landscape as personal history, and a marker of time’s passage, Puchuncaví is a project in ongoing mutation, as Muñoz uses 16mm film to capture the same Chilean coastal town every time she travels there, making several cuts and revisions along the way. The storied place has been part of the Inca road system, a center for healing, a site of dumping and pollution, and a fishing port. The works in this program, like Muñoz’s, include raw and sensitive excavations into personal history and environments, and express the entangled inheritances endemic to any forms of self.
Program 4: Living Among Ruins presents the work of Brazilian artist Zezinho Yube, Já me transformei en imagen (I already became an image). A striking documentary that shifts cinematic ethnographic tropes (the face-to-face confrontation, the first-contact footage, the didactic voiceover), and produced by Videos nas Aldeias, Já me transformei em imagen illustrates how the Amazonian Hunikui people became subjects of a foreign gaze. Taking back the archival materials made by others serves as a reminder of the hardships that the community has had to endure since their first encounter with white settlers. Examining earlier languages, biases, and forms of representation, the works in this program, including Yube’s, use found footage and archival matter to shed light on the specificity of disciplines of categorization.
Program 5: Collaborative Survival groups films that speak from different ontological perspectives, imagining how plants and animals might see, focusing on microscopic views, images of decay, forest floor–level views, and other attempts at non-human-centered perspectives. The Mexican Colectivo Los Ingrávidos presents their film Eroded Pyramid in this section: the flicker of rock vestiges from a Mexican pyramid proffers an earthly hallucinatory cinematic experience, bringing us back to the lost rituals that the archeological site once hosted.
The program also includes The Great Silence from Puerto Rican-based Allora & Calzadilla with Ted Chiang — which explores the connections between humans and animals, the terrestrial and the cosmic, the living and the decayed — as well as director Huertas Millán’s Jiíbie, which touches on the fabrication ritual of a green coca powder (called mambe or “Jíibie”) that unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. The films in this program are consequently experienced as immersive, saturated, and sometimes even psychedelic, breaking from what could be thought of as typical documentary or ethnographic aesthetics.
Program 6: Troublemakers: Subversive Fictions reclaims the subversive powers of the imagination, transforming marginality into fertile lands of playfulness and new storytelling. This section brings audiences special screenings of Colombian filmmakers Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s 1971 and 1972 films Chircales/The Brickmakers and Planas, testimonio de un etnocidio/Plains: Testimony of an Ethnocide. Both films marked the beginning of a socially engaged oeuvre, focused on the Colombian working class and the plights of the nation’s indigenous populations. Made with a pair of Bolex cameras on loan from the dictator Rojas Pinilla’s official TV station, Chircales is the story of a family of brickmakers on the outskirts of Bogotá. Planas, testimonio de un etnocidio documents the massacre of indigenous people in Vichada, in eastern Colombia, and denounces the past and present indigenous exterminations by the Colombian state.
Also included in the final program is Cuban director Sara Gómez’s 1977 film De cierta manera / One Way or Another. A posthumous release that looks back at the Cuban revolution (1953-1959) and the radical urban and social transformations of Havan, the film intertwines both real and fictional characters. De cierta manera depicts the difficulty, or impossibility, for a romantic couple to live up to the revolutionary expectations of the “Hombre nuevo — the “New Man” as coined by Che Guevara, a notion that describes a Marxist paradigm of a “new” human being turned toward collectivity, with access to universal education and health care, able to leave behind gendered and racialized forms of oppression.
Make sure to check out the full lineup for this year's festival at filmlinc.org!
