Over 6,000 gold prospectors invade the reserve of the Nambiquara of Sararé, and loggers raid the mahogany-rich forests, which are threatened by extinction. Pressure on the World Bank (with whom the government of Mato Grosso is negotiating a loan) could end prospecting, but the pillage of the forest continues.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Directed by Vincent Carelli, Maurizio Longobardi, and Virginia Valadão; edited by Tutu Nunes.

Over 6,000 gold prospectors invade the reserve of the Nambiquara of Sararé, and loggers raid the mahogany-rich forests, which are threatened by extinction. Pressure on the World Bank (with whom the government of Mato Grosso is negotiating a loan) could end prospecting, but the pillage of the forest continues.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Directed by Vincent Carelli, Maurizio Longobardi, and Virginia Valadão; edited by Tutu Nunes.

Four Ikpeng children reply to a video-letter from the children of Sierra Maestra in Cuba, introducing their village, families, toys, celebrations, and ways of life with grace and lightheartedness. Curious to know about children from other cultures, they ask to continue the correspondence.

Direction and camera by Karané, Kumaré, and Natuyu Yuwipo Txicão; edited by Mari Corrê.

"i am very grateful that my 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) series has shown internationally over the last couple years and is recognized by viewers, reviewers, critics, and curators as doing decolonizing work as a feminist project that queers and glitches the Western genre. 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) questions the quintessentially American Western in the forms of experimental films and games that are made from glitches and noise, pushing boundaries of legibility and tipping over threshold states of stability.

Chief Pedro Mãmãindê (who directed the proceedings and the shoot itself) describes the necessity of strengthening the girls of his village by secluding them after their first menses. After several months, the village throws a party, with singing, feasting, and the ritual abduction of the girl by an allied village. When the Nambiquara of Mato Grosso see videotape of themselves performing this ritual, the excess of Western clothing makes them uncomfortable. The ritual is then re-enacted with traditional body painting and adornment.

Chief Pedro Mãmãindê (who directed the proceedings and the shoot itself) describes the necessity of strengthening the girls of his village by secluding them after their first menses. After several months, the village throws a party, with singing, feasting, and the ritual abduction of the girl by an allied village. When the Nambiquara of Mato Grosso see videotape of themselves performing this ritual, the excess of Western clothing makes them uncomfortable. The ritual is then re-enacted with traditional body painting and adornment.

Indians In Brazil is an educational series for Brazilian public schools that invites students to experience cultural diversity. Four teenagers are invited to discover a new world and participate in Indian daily life in two different communities. They show their emotions, curiosity and fears, and are surprised by their new friends.

Indians In Brazil is an educational series for Brazilian public schools that invites students to experience cultural diversity. Four teenagers are invited to discover a new world and participate in Indian daily life in two different communities. They show their emotions, curiosity and fears, and are surprised by their new friends.

Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression. 

Based on his ever-changing performance Indian Tails, this video features Luna sitting alone in his darkened room in front of the TV on Christmas Eve. As he sits, he calls friends, family and ex-lovers, excusing himself from all their celebrations. Luna tells us, "In the work there is a thin line between what is fictional and what is non-fiction, and what is real emotion and what is art. … There is a cultural element where I let (or seem to let) people in on American Indian cultures.

"On my mother’s side there are two lands I come from, separated by the Atlantic ocean, all those fathoms deep. The lands of my grandma and grandpa. I had been through the lands of my grandfather, that is where I still live. The now tamed prairies, missing their bison herds and fenced out into neat geometrical patterns. My grandma comes from a similarly colonized land, Scotland. Ruled by the British Commonwealth and forbidden to speak their language. . . I had never been to Scotland. And I wanted to see my Grandma’s traditional territory.

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.

“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.
If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya
way ya hi ya way ya hi yo.”

A myth illustrated on the stones of a waterfall, the reconstruction of a great communal hut, the attempt to recover objects kept for years in a museum in Manaus. In IAUARETÊ, Waterfall of the Jaguars the Tariano Indians, of the North-western Amazon, after decades of missionary catechism, decide to make a cultural record for future generations.

Direction: Vincent Carelli

Photography: Vincent Carelli and Altair Paixão

Editing: Joana Collier

Production: IPHAN / Vídeo nas Aldeias

A myth illustrated on the stones of a waterfall, the reconstruction of a great communal hut, the attempt to recover objects kept for years in a museum in Manaus. In IAUARETÊ, Waterfall of the Jaguars the Tariano Indians, of the North-western Amazon, after decades of missionary catechism, decide to make a cultural record for future generations.

Direction: Vincent Carelli

Photography: Vincent Carelli and Altair Paixão

Editing: Joana Collier

Production: IPHAN / Vídeo nas Aldeias

It's the time of celebration and merriment in the Alto Xingu. The dry season is coming to an end. 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.

Direction: Takumã and Maricá Kuikuro

Photography: Takumã, Mariká, Amuneri, Asusu, Jairão and Maluki

A woman raises her voice and gives a painful and endless speech that with time becomes even more overwhelming, because her words are heartbreaking and permanent impressions in the collective memory, stabbing with words an old Mexican film, a celluloid that tears apart until its disappearance.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

The Island Weights is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

The scales of the snake refract a trance and invocation. In the epicenter, the pyramids join Izcóatl's battle, the Obsidian Serpent propagates an exhortation: all the dances against the war.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of the artist and his father, and videos gathered of the landscapes they both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.

The Waiãpi videomaker Kasiripinã decides to show white people the documentation he did on his people in Amapo. He presents and comments on three celebrations that represent episodes of the myth-cycle of the creation of the universe. The theme of the Tamoko celebration is war, and it presents the death of a cannibal monster. In the second celebration, Pikyry, the dancers act out the spawning of fish. The last is the Turé, the dance of the flutes, in which the Waiãpi reenact the death of the tapir in honor of the creator, Janejar.

Directed by Kasiripinã Waiãpi.

The Waiãpi videomaker Kasiripinã decides to show white people the documentation he did on his people in Amapo. He presents and comments on three celebrations that represent episodes of the myth-cycle of the creation of the universe. The theme of the Tamoko celebration is war, and it presents the death of a cannibal monster. In the second celebration, Pikyry, the dancers act out the spawning of fish. The last is the Turé, the dance of the flutes, in which the Waiãpi reenact the death of the tapir in honor of the creator, Janejar.

Directed by Kasiripinã Waiãpi.

Produced at the San Francisco Art Institute, and featuring a few musical numbers, this jungle drama deals with a commercial corporation infiltrating the Amazon to sell beauty aids to the indigenous peoples. Witch doctor magic and political intrigue run rampant in this hot house environment, and men and women deal with the beast within and without.

Four tales about cannibal monsters narrated and performed by the Waiãpi Indians. “We have made the video,” say the Waiãpi, “to teach people to be more careful with monsters they never heard about. Even a white man can be eaten as he goes into the forest.”

Directed by Vincent Carelli and Dominique Gallois.

Edited by Tutu Nunes.

In Waiãpi with English subtitles.

Four tales about cannibal monsters narrated and performed by the Waiãpi Indians. “We have made the video,” say the Waiãpi, “to teach people to be more careful with monsters they never heard about. Even a white man can be eaten as he goes into the forest.”

Directed by Vincent Carelli and Dominique Gallois.

Edited by Tutu Nunes.

In Waiãpi with English subtitles.

Invited to speak at an Indigenous Revolutionary Meeting, the narrator describes an intimate encounter with an Evil Colonizing Queen which leads to Turtle Island's contraction of an invasive European flora.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.