Small Cinemas of the Andes

There is an important corpus of films produced in the region that feature the representation of the Andes as a central element. This chapter aims to investigate the main narrative approaches and aesthetic characteristics that comprise depictions of the Andean world in Latin American cinema in recent decades. The author considers the ways in which the notion of “small(er) cinemas” contributes to studying the diversity of cinemas produced in the Andean region, since doing so permits her to discuss both the conditions of production and the deployment of “small cinemas” in this unique context.

The audiovisual practices of native peoples in Colombia have been on the rise. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the number of Indigenous collectives dedicated to the production of audiovisual content could be counted on one hand. Today a complex scenario has emerged that includes different modes of production, practices, aesthetics and strategies involving more than sixty Indigenous collectives. This chapter introduces the analytical categories of indigeneity and visuality. It discusses the appropriations of the technological repertoires of the Arhuaco, Kogui, Wiwa, Embera, Makuna and Nasa peoples and the demands for audiovisual sovereignty articulated by national Indigenous organizations.

This chapter is a personal testimony of the author, an Indigenous filmmaker from Ecuador, and part of the binational Pasto people. It relates the experience of the audiovisual collective that she co-founded, Corporation of Audiovisual Producers of Nationalities and Peoples (CORPANP). It examines Indigenous audiovisual production as it relates to self-representation, self-determination, content design, collective creation and Indigenous techniques. It discusses the concept of cosmovivencia, which describes not just how Indigenous people see the world, but how they live it.

This chapter critically reviews the literature on Indigenous video and the fundamental concepts that have been developed to grasp its complexity and put it in dialogue with subaltern and post-national visual cultures. It outlines the trajectory of communicative and cultural debates on Indigenous audiovisual practices as a background to study the work and thought of Alberto Muenala and Amaru Cholango, two Indigenous artists and pioneers in the use of video in Ecuador. Based on the conceptions of these two filmmakers, Indigenous audiovisual practices are defined as decolonial, post-national and intercultural forms of video creation within the context of minority poetics and small audiovisual expressions.

This chapter analyzes audiovisual practices that are frequently associated with the term “community cinema.” The authors’ situate their approach to this concept within the debate on the production of the commons, a framework that emphasizes the social and material relations that make audiovisual practices possible, as well as the political and social networks that sustain them. The chapter first reviews the literature on community audiovisual practices and related film movements such as the Latin American popular, Indigenous video, and development communication. It then discusses the authors’ conceptual framework when analyzing community audiovisual practices. The chapter references case studies of collectives and organizations located in Peru that, like their collective Maizal, engage in audiovisual practice at the borders of hegemonic fields.

“Our stories also deserve to be told” is a slogan of the Al Borde Audiovisual School, a transfeminist and artivist community film project that has toured South America since 2011, producing autobiographical documentaries with communities that inhabit the margins of gender and sexuality. This chapter, written by the founder of the film school, examines the history, pedagogy, distinctive features and trajectory of this groundbreaking audiovisual project. It also analyzes how the embodied gaze, which circulates through gender and/or desire, redefines what is visible in cinema from both behind and in front of the camera. The chapter then discusses several of its autobiographical documentaries, which challenge the cis-heteronormative perspective of dominant cinemas. It reflects on the affective and political potentialities of the autobiographical documentary made in the community, which activates changes in the ways one looks, in order to build cinemas tailored to the needs and wishes of its makers.

This collectively written chapter places Ojo Semilla’s itinerant laboratory of audiovisual practices in dialogue with feminist theories, concepts and pedagogies. It examines how Ojo Semilla’s community-based, intercultural and decolonial workshops open spaces for Afro, Mestiza, Indigenous, rural and urban women to shape their own narratives and aesthetics. It analyzes how the process of audiovisual creation facilitates the recovery of women’s stories, experiences, and historic memory. A discussion of three of its short films demonstrate how Ojo Semilla’s productions use diverse genres to explore the themes of bodily and territorial autonomy. The chapter argues that feminist community cinema is a plural construction that enables its participants to make their voices and demands heard and felt.

This chapter analyzes the emergence and growth of six regional community film festivals in Colombia. It first offers a brief literature review of scholarly works about community cinema. The category of festivals from the peripheries, the emergence of exhibition circuits and the appropriation of peripheral audiovisualities are discussed and put in dialogue with the category of community cinema. The author proposes that these community film festivals are better understood as long-term processes that go beyond the temporality of an event. She argues that they arise from a territorialized sense of the audiovisual, for which they are referred to as “festival-processes.” This chapter also discusses, through several case studies, how these festival-processes set in motion a series of pedagogical and educational processes that are designed to strengthen communities.

This chapter proposes a rereading of community cinema in dialogue with the notion of “small(er) cinemas,” “hybrid media activism” and the “eco-territorial turn,” as an emerging political-communication practice that is part of the repertoires of the eco-territorial defense networks struggles against the extractive industry in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Using multisited ethnography, the author analyzes the production and exhibition practices of the Etsa-Nantu/Cámara-Shuar audiovisual creation laboratory, which generates cinema with and from the view of the Shuar people, who are threatened by mining, oil, hydroelectric and logging industries. The chapter proposes the notion of eco-territorial community cinema that includes an “expanded community” perspective in an intercultural key, connecting indigenous and non-indigenous actors, as well as translocal elements since this is revitalized in various urban and rural areas.

This chapter sheds light on Guayaquil's amateur film history, with a close look at the works of the most prolific amateur filmmakers from the 1920s to the present. The author argues that these filmmakers and films have been very important in Guayaquil's film history, even if they have been systematically excluded from it. She argues that some of Ecuador’s most creative and experimental films have been made by amateur filmmakers in smaller and nonprofessional film formats. Likewise, the chapter looks at amateur film in relation to national identity politics and proposes that these films and filmmakers extend past national borders and connect Ecuador to film practices and artistic explorations in other parts of the world.

This chapter describes and analyzes the “bastard cinema” of María Galindo, Bolivian artist, radio broadcaster, writer and anarcho-feminist filmmaker. It focuses on her audiovisual production, which Galindo has been able to develop, mature and transform during thirty years of activity. The study examines her historical journey and artistic trajectory. It also traces a historical genealogy of the multiplicity of aesthetic languages that Galindo and the other members of the Mujeres Creando movement have been using since 1992. This group is a reference point for Latin America on issues of feminism, social struggle, depatriarchalization and decolonization. The author argues that Galindo embodies the relationship between politics and art in a manner similar to that of intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pedro Lemebel, inhabiting a territory that is a much broader geopolitical space than that marked by a border.

This chapter analyzes a sector of ultra-low-budget filmmaking in the Ecuadorian coastal town of Chone. “Chonewood” is considered a small cinema in that it defies the quitocentrismo of Ecuador’s “official cinema.” The characters who comprise “Chomewood” movies tend to be Montubio (coastal peasants) in contrast to the light-skinned, middle-class urbanite characters that comprise the country’s film board-backed cinema. The author situates Chomewood filmmaking in the context of two imaginaries specific to the Montubio experience. First, there is what he refers to as “pirate modernity,” a collectivistic defiance of Ecuador’s audiovisual divide. Second, this small cinema sector has revitalized the nineteenth-century notion of “radical modernity,” an alternative notion of Ecuatorianidad, which took form during the Liberal Revolution (1895–1920). The author’s examination of various Chonewood films demonstrates that they are complex, multivalent texts through which local subjectivities of the Ecuadorian negotiated and reimagined.

This chapter gives an overview of Peruvian Regional Cinema, which the authors broadly define as filmmaking that takes place outside of Lima and is a low-budget cinema with artisanal forms of production and distribution using channels outside of the multiplex circuit. The chapter explains the reasons for its emergence, describes the profiles of regional filmmakers and explains how the production, filming, distribution and exhibition systems of regional films work. The chapter also analyzes the genres, as well as the narratives, used in these films. Finally, the analysis considers support provided by the state for regional filmmaking.

Since the 1990s, Peru has experienced a cinematographic explosion known as regional cinema. It is a rural, self-financed, low-budget cinema that, given the difficulties of being distributed in commercial theaters, is usually distributed through alternative circuits, mainly in the regions of Puno and Ayacucho. This chapter focuses on the cinema of Ayacucho, and more specifically on the horror genre, to analyze its role in the processes of memory, trauma and reconciliation in the region after the Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000). The author argues that horror films from Ayacucho, though they do not explicitly address the war, have a direct relationship with the real terror experienced by the Indigenous communities during those decades. To this end, aspects such as the administration of difference, the epistemic relevance of orality in the context of multiculturalism, and, finally, the bio- and necropolitical dimension of war and the handling of bodies are examined.

This article examines a film sector in Colombia ignored by film researchers and institutions, feature films made with a minimal budget from peripheral cities that narrate local issues with mainstream narratives and aesthetics. Distributed through DVD copies sold by street vendors, as well as online platforms, these films have found an audience in popular sectors that recognize themselves and their surroundings in these films. Drawing on interviews with the filmmakers, content analysis of several films and the comments of online platform users, this chapter analyzes the production and distribution of these popular films. The study of these productions demonstrates their value by shedding light on historical violence, gender narratives and film development in Colombia.

In this chapter, the author reflects on the aesthetics of difference, using two Bolivian films, Linchamiento (Bautista, Ronald. Linchamiento. Bolivia: Independent, 2011. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​Dgp5366WSWo&​t=​22s) and La cholita condenada por su manta de vicuña (Walter and Jaime Machaca. La chola condenada por su manta de vicuña. Bolivia: Sagitario 3000, 2012. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​6SMdwQSbBAE&​t=​2s). This case study allows an analysis of modes of production in a context of precarious cultural institutionality, as well as a scarce audiovisual production. Examining these two films leads to a discussion about alternative ways of creating, circulating and consuming images in the Bolivian plurinational state. To do this, the author proposes the categories “peripheral cinema” and “marginal cinema” in the Bolivian context. This chapter also examines the kind of narratives and stories these films develop and how they construct “the other.” Finally, these two films are in put in dialogue with Bolivia’s dominant cinema.