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Review Essays
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2011 “Position Among the Stars” Director Leonard Retel
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2002 It Takes a Madrasah? Habermas Meets Bourdieu in
Indonesia. South East Asia Research 9(1):109–122.
“Since You Are Filming, I Will Tell the Truth”:
A Reflection on the Cultural Activism and
Collaborative Filmmaking of Video Nas Aldeias
Zoe Graham
New York University
A village elder pauses to catch his thoughts, looking
straight into the camera lens: “since you are filming, I
will tell the truth.” This humorous and profound moment
in Tava: A Stone House (Carelli et al. 2013), one of the
recent works by filmmaking collective Video Nas Aldeias
(Video in the Villages [VIV]), captures the unique collaborative ethos and cultural activism of a groundbreaking
group that, for the past three decades, has forcefully
asserted the indigenous presence in the Brazilian film
and sociocultural landscape. The documentary—by
Patricia Ferreira (Mbya-Guarani), Ariel Duarte Ortega
(Mbya-Guarani), Vincent Carelli, and Ernesto de
Carvalho—tells the story of 17th-century Jesuit missions
in Brazil from a Mbya-Guarani perspective. Although the
ancestors of today’s Mbya-Guarani indigenous peoples
were forcibly recruited to build these missions on what
were once their lands, their descendants now find themselves excluded from this heritage; the ruins are today
popular tourist sites that have been appropriated by
dominant national discourses. The film premiered to a
New York audience on the first night of a three-day
retrospective, “Video in the Villages: Celebrating Three
Decades of Filmmaking in the Amazon,” organized by
the Center for Media, Culture and History—part of the
Department of Anthropology at New York University, the
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and
the National Museum of the American Indian from
October 3–5, 2013. Indigenous filmmakers, scholars, and
89
supporters gathered at New York University’s (NYU) King
Juan Carlos I Centre and Tisch School of the Arts for film
screenings, panel discussions, and informal events in
honor of the collective’s trailblazing work. This timely
retrospective took place in the same week that indigenous activists staged protests across Brazil against constitutional reforms that would prevent the rightful
recognition of indigenous territories.
VIV was founded in 1986 by filmmaker and indigenous activist Vincent Carelli, initially as part of the
indigenous advocacy organization Centro de Trabalho
Indigenista. Its inaugural goal was to build a collaborative video practice with indigenous peoples in the
Amazon, allowing them to take control of images of
their communities and make themselves heard at a
national level. VIV eventually became an independent
entity in 1997. Its vision of using filmmaking and
communication to empower indigenous communities
has, since then, gained the group wide acclaim, from
humanitarian organizations, film critics, and scholars
alike (Aufderheide 2008; Bernardet 2004; Caxeita de
Queiroz 2006; Fausto 2006; Ginsburg 1998; Stam 1997).
The recent New York retrospective was testament to the
extraordinary impact of VIV—today an international
reference point for indigenous and collaborative media
making, as well as a model for intercultural communication and indigenous pedagogy.
Alongside screenings of the group’s canonical films
such as Video Nas Aldeias (Carelli 1989), The Spirit of
TV (Carelli 1990), and Meeting Ancestors (Carelli
1992)—works that originally drew international attention and funding to the project—the retrospective
placed a more pronounced focus on the collective’s
recent work, made by a new generation of indigenous
filmmakers, including VIV’s first female indigenous
director. Over three days, audiences had the opportunity
to engage with this younger generation, represented by
Patricia Ferreira (Mbya-Guarani) and Ariel Duarte
Ortega (Mbya-Guarani) as well as veteran filmmaker
Divino Tserewahú (Xavante), Brazilian filmmaker, NYU
doctoral student in anthropology, and VIV teacher
Ernesto de Carvalho, and founder Vincent Carelli. Longstanding advocates of the project introduced the sessions, with presentations by Patricia Aufderheide,
Amalia Cordova, Faye Ginsburg, Robert Stam, and Pegi
Vail. Both filmmakers and scholars alike emphasized the
collaborative ethos of VIV, Carelli describing its teaching methodology as an “openness to the other.”
Indeed, VIV’s history has been one of reciprocal
discovery and exchange. Many of its early films were
made in collaboration with anthropologists who had
intimate relationships with the communities being filmed
(The Spirit of TV [Carelli 1990] was made possible by
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VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2014
Dominique Gallois’ long-term involvement with the
Waiapi Indians in Amapa, and Carlos Fausto facilitated
exchanges with the Kuikuro community). The development of the training workshops, which came later in
1997, was influenced by Mari Correa, a teacher with the
Ateliers Varan, a transnational documentary training
school that was conceived by French anthropologist and
filmmaker Jean Rouch in Mozambique in 1978. Carelli
and Correa adapted some of the Ateliers Varan pedagogical methods that placed greater emphasis on filming
spontaneous everyday realities. The lasting impact of this
training was to encourage filmmakers to focus on the
everyday lives of people in their communities, building a
level of trust and complicity between filmmaker and
subject. As with all these influences, however, VIV has
“indigenized” the techniques so that this collective creation incorporates the whole village in the filmmaking
process, broadening the ethical dimension of the films
and the accountability of the filmmaker.
VIV’s films emphasize embedded aesthetics
(Ginsburg 1994)—the social relations produced through
the filmmaking process—as much as the final product
itself. Ariel Duarte Ortega, who is today the cacique of his
village, claims that before they started filming in the
community, the village was divided. His work as a
filmmaker has taught him to listen to others and has led
the community to accept him as a leader, through an
organic social process that clearly has its own impact. As
Ortega explained, following the screening of Tava, it was
important to the filmmakers that the community and
subjects of the film understand the importance of the
project. Unlike the photographic practices of tourists at
the ruins, they actively seek permission and feedback.
Throughout the documentary, we hear subjects from the
community offering the filmmakers advice and often
filming the filmmaking process itself on their own mobile
phones in a reflexive and reciprocal act. This immersive
collaboration and true intimacy between filmmakers and
subjects could also be seen in Ortega and Ferreira’s films
Bicycles of Nhanderu (Ferreira and Ortega 2011) and
Mbya Mirim (Ferreira and Ortega 2013). Bicycles of
Nhanderu immerses the viewer in the spiritual dimension
of daily life in the Mbya-Guarani village of Koenju in Rio
Grande do Sul, as the whole village comes together to
build a house of worship. Mbya Mirim treats similar
issues of the community, this time as seen through the
eyes of two Mbya-Guarani children, Neneco and
Palermo. These youngsters continually dialogue with the
camera, looking straight into the lens, like the village
elder in Tava. Explaining the subjects’ fluid engagement
and comfort with the medium, Ortega explains that “the
camera itself has become Guarani, not just some tool that
has come from the white people.”
While VIV’s collaborative model has evolved and
continues to evolve, in a joint search for a methodology
between indigenous and non-indigenous filmmakers,
what has not changed is its “unsentimental political
pragmatism” (Aufderheide 2008), effectively using
expression to leverage political action. Vincent Carelli’s
activist engagement goes back as far as 1969, when he
first arrived in the village of Xikrin as a teenager and
describes being adopted by the village elders and entering into indigenism as a “son” rather than “father” of
Indians (Carelli 2006). His most recent work in progress,
Resistance, brings together his experience of over 30
years of filming with indigenous communities. Initiated
by VIV after a succession of murders happened in the
villages of Guarani-Kaiowá in late 2012, several clips
from this shocking footage were screened at the retrospective. Following on from Carelli’s award-winning
investigative documentary Corumbiara (Carelli 2009),
which brought together material accumulated over three
decades, Resistance offers a powerful denunciation of
impunity and national forgetting.
Discussing the impact of VIV, Vincent Carelli modestly claims: “perhaps the only vanguard of Video Nas
Aldeias has been the politics of giving a voice to those
that never had the tools for expression” (Caxeita de
Queiroz 2009). Yet the dynamism, depth, and urgency of
the films also place VIV at the vanguard of a new
cinematic vision, one based on ethical commitments as
well a powerful hybrid aesthetic, born from exchange
and relationality. Xavante filmmaker Divino Tserewahú’s
impressive body of work bears these signs of hybridity:
after a career of over two decades filming and teaching in
the Xavante community, as well as receiving widespread
recognition for his work on the international festival
circuit, Divino is adept at code switching. From the late
1980s to the present day, Divino has been the official
filmmaker in his village, partnering with VIV and more
recently VIV teacher and filmmaker Tiago Campos
Torres. While the Xavante have always been primarily
interested in documenting the rituals that structure their
society, Divino’s film Sangradouro (Tserewahú and
Torres 2009) breaks with this tradition to explore the
contradictions generated in his community since contact
with the Salesian missionaries in 1957. The film tells this
history for the first time from the point of view of the
Xavante community, presenting the challenges and
changes the community is going through as well as its
own reflection on its past. The film achieves this complexity in both the narrative and aesthetic sense, showing
the tensions between the generations, between cultures,
as well as between the different visual legacies that the
communities have been subjects to. Sangradouro juxtaposes different layers of documentation, with missionary
Review Essays
archival films alongside oral testimonies by the Xavante
elders, visually enacting a process of re-signification,
reclaiming this history from an indigenous point of view.
The closing night documentary, The Master and
Divino (2013) by Tiago Campos Torres, is the latest in a
long line of prize-winning works in the VIV archive,
composed of over 80 films made with 37 indigenous
communities in Brazil. The film won the prestigious
awards for Best Documentary, Best Soundtrack, and
Best Editing at the Brasilia Festival of Brazilian Cinema
in October 2013. This time the lens is turned on filmmaker Divino Tserewahú and his relationship with an
eccentric Salesian missionary Adalbert Heide, who has
taught and filmed in the community since 1957. Divino’s film archive is counterposed with Heide’s, offering
two different views of Xavante culture as well as two
separate film aesthetics: one of a “heroic figure” stuck in
the colonial past, the other a Xavante filmmaker in the
present. Rather than rendering a stark distinction
between them, however, the film focuses on the
complex relationship between the two men, with Divino
acknowledging the Salesian influences that, for better
or worse, have shaped him and his community. This
repurposing of archival material and subtle intertwining
of narratives is evident in several films by this new
generation of indigenous filmmakers who showcase the
living and adaptive traditions of the indigenous present.
For three decades, VIV has contested the marginalization of indigenous communities in Brazil. Like the
words uttered by the village elder in Tava, quoted in the
opening sentence of this article, the recent New York
retrospective emphasized the possibilities of another
national truth that reflects an indigenous point of view,
as well as the catalytic effect filmmaking has had in
revealing these hidden stories. The profoundly collaborative and reflexive nature of the VIV films showcased
continues to push the boundaries of ethnographic and
documentary film’s ethical and aesthetic reach.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Faye Ginsburg for her constructive comments
on this review.
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