Brazilian Indigenous Women’s Film Production as a Tool for Pluralizing Visual Experiences

Introduction: Appropriating the Video

The development of digital technologies enables easier access to the production and dissemination of audiovisual artworks, which presents both opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning with audiovisual materials in academia. The proliferation of materials and their online accessibility necessitate the implementation of a dialogical approach in which films are experienced, interpreted, and analyzed through an anthropological framework, and how they affect viewers (Favret-Saada 2012). In this essay, I outline how I incorporated audiovisual artworks produced by Indigenous women filmmakers from Brazil into a course dedicated to visual anthropology and visual culture at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, and how they diversified imagistic experiences in the classroom.

Until a few years ago, producing audiovisual materials by, with, or about Indigenous peoples was a privilege enjoyed by a select few specialists or reserved for large documentary productions. However, since the popularization of the first mobile cameras, Indigenous peoples in Brazil have appropriated filmmaking technologies to raise awareness about their struggles and promote their unique visual and sensory experiences. The Kayapó Indigenous people recorded their own videos as early as 1980, both to document their culture and as a tool for their political struggles with non-Indigenous societies (Turner 1991). During the same period, the project Video nas Aldeias initiated ongoing efforts to make audiovisual tools accessible to Indigenous peoples through courses and other educational initiatives (Araújo 2019). In more recent years, these practices have proliferated, with an increasing number of Indigenous filmmakers creating fictional and documentary videos in various formats. An example is the Ijã Mytyli Cine Collective of the Manoki and Myky people, who bring together a group of young filmmakers focused on promoting “another way of telling stories,” as their website explains.1

This audiovisual prominence is also linked to the increasing presence of Indigenous people in universities, politics, and social media in Brazil. An example is the National Articulation of Indigenous Women Warriors of Ancestry, which promotes actions for the defense of Indigenous rights in Brazil. In these diverse and complementary spheres, Indigenous peoples are not only disseminating their epistemologies, communications, and politics but also demanding a redefinition of orthodox formats. For instance, the presence of Indigenous peoples and their claims for recognition in academia compel us to shift from the notion of studying them to the notion of studying with them (Bollettin 2023). As articulated during the Indigenous Women’s March, which took place in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, in 2019, this activism underscores the importance of understanding that “it is not enough to recognize our narratives; it is necessary to recognize our narrators” (Marcha das Mulheres Indígenas 2021, 343). If, in Brazil, Indigenous peoples physically occupy universities, influencing how academia engages with their proposals (Bollettin and Tromboni 2021), inclusive in the use of visual materials (Xikrin and Bollettin 2022), the question remains: how can this be effectively realized in Europe, where such presence is less evident?

Watching the Katahirine – Audiovisual Network of Indigenous Women

In the autumn semester of 2024, we—eighteen students, one main teacher, and several guests—launched a new version of a course focused on visual anthropology and visual culture. This course aims to introduce historical and contemporary debates on the subject, particularly to collectively reflect on the visual as both the object of attention and an epistemic tool in anthropological efforts. Throughout the semester, we engaged with content in a variety of ways, such as readings, video screenings, documenting protests, and visiting museum exhibitions. One module was dedicated to Indigenous visual experiences and included two complementary exercises. The first event in the course calendar was a visit to the exhibition “Menire nhõ kubēkà ôk: Mebengokré Women With Their Painted Fabrics,” which was co-curated by Mebengokré-Xikrin Indigenous women at the Department of Anthropology at Masaryk University. The second was viewing sessions of a curated selection of films available on the platform Katahirine: Rede Audiovisual das Mulheres Indígenas (Audiovisual Network of Indigenous Women).

The Katahirine is an open-access platform created in 2022 and launched in 2023, when Sonia Guajajara was the Minister of Indigenous People of the Brazilian Government and the first Indigenous woman to hold a ministerial position in the country. It has the ambitious goal of mapping the growth of audiovisual production by Indigenous women in Brazil. The word katahirine originates from the language of the Manchineri people in the Amazon, meaning "constellation." This term refers to the plurality, connection, and union of voices and authors composing a panorama in which both recognized and emerging artists come together, translating their differences into sensory richness and a political tool. This diversity comprises numerous filmmakers who utilize their languages, document their cultures, mobilize their visual sensitivities, and raise awareness about the struggles faced by their communities. The website openly states, Katahirine is “a space focused on the leading role of Indigenous women, on agency and political roles in our contexts, inside and outside the villages: we act in decision-making and management of audiovisual production resources, and we create according to our conceptions of the world and life.”

The participants in the course at Masaryk University were asked to select, according to their individual preferences, between three and five pieces of video art from the more than one hundred films, documentaries, and web stories collected on the Katahirine platform. One concern was the linguistic barrier, as most of the content is in Portuguese or Indigenous languages, accompanied by Portuguese subtitles. However, since these materials are available on YouTube, we utilized the automatic translation of the subtitles when accessible. After viewing videos individually, each participant shared reflections on their originality and offered interpretations focusing on both content and visual aesthetics during the collective classroom discussion. Following this, students produced a concise report of approximately one page to formalize their ideas. The exercise aimed to stimulate critical thinking both about how cultural dimensions, grounded and situated contexts, and embodied practices shape the videos they observed and also about how their own visual experiences reflect parallel influences.

The students selected a variety of videos; however, due to the limited space of this essay, I will provide only a few examples. In discussions, both in the classroom and in the written comments, the participants highlighted the content and styles of the films. In a documentary style featuring interviews and detached framings, Xipi käja (Our healthy foods; 2021) links the dietary changes among the Manoky people to deforestation and the onset of the COVID pandemic. The use of the moving camera illustrates the shared food experience in the village, calling attention to the collective relations and the co-production of socialities. Originárias (The Originals [feminine]; 2022) is a collage of images and voices of Indigenous women during various protests that shows their empowerment in the struggle for their rights. Directors Emília Top'tiro and Isabelle Fanaia patch together images and activists’ voices to signify the primacy of orality as a political tool among the Indigenous people. Uru’Ku (2021) performs a critique of the capitalistic and patriarchal system, comparing animal husbandry to the colonization of Indigenous peoples. It creates a multisensory experience, starting with a singer’s voice and a person standing outdoors, silent, within an enclosure that looks like an animal pen. The on-screen body positioning makes evident the person’s identity, which affirms their resistance in relation to pictures of the ancestors that appear near the end of the film. Karaiw a’e wà (Os civilisados/The civilized; 2022) enacts a futuristic vision of a technological society that produces a sense of displacement, emphasized by the electronic music and the contrast between pervasive white color and the protagonist's face that is painted red and black (revealed toward the end of the film). This critique of techno-utopias favors instead an Indigenous ancestry projected to the future in the face of current global struggles (Krenak 2022).

These films, as well as the others discussed in the course, take a range of approaches to presenting images in connection with their grounded context and meanings. A commonality we observed was the use of the camera to produce embodied emotional and social messages, whether focused on collective eating as a form of enabling connections among people or through a close-up of an Indigenous woman’s face against a white background. We used examples like these to promote reflection on how we can be affected by cinematography that foregrounds embodied relations. Another aspect that gained attention was the filmmakers’ juxtaposition of sounds and images. Indigenous women’s voices create a sense of community and shared fights for their rights when associated with the portraits of the speakers, or in a singing voice accompanying the visualisation of a person who, while exiting a farm enclosure, silently paints their body with pigment from a plant as a way to connect with ancestors. We then discussed how these sensory experiences convey a message, allowing this medium to express not only aesthetic preferences but also epistemic choices about how to connect voice and sounds or to make political statements on Indigenous collective experiences and fights for rights.

Embodied and Territorialized Images

The brief descriptions above emphasize how the artworks collected on the Katahirine platform, along with others created by Indigenous women in Brazil, can foster critical thinking regarding audiovisual media as tools for promoting alternative epistemologies, methods of communication, and politics. Indigenous women are increasingly producing audiovisual artworks in which they articulate, through their unique perspectives, their specific sensitivities and embodied experiences. Ranging from documentary styles to performance art, they employ various techniques and visual formats. This plurality illuminates the potential of audiovisual media to convey the artists' specific cultural foundations, rooting them in the contextual lives and struggles of their communities. This idea emerged as particularly significant in our discussion, emphasizing the importance of considering the situated, embodied experiences underpinning audiovisual productions. The visual choices of the artists shape and are shaped by these experiences, which we explored by reflecting on the intersectional positions of both the artists and their interlocutors in the creative processes.

As underlined by Célia Nunes Corrêa Xakriabá in a co-authored piece (Augusto, Xakriabá, and Pôrto 2022), Indigenous women are body-territories engaged in a continuous process of reterritorialization. Indigenous filmmakers explore this inextricable connection among people, culture, lands, knowledge, ancestry, and politics by appropriating video art as a new political instrument. Their films (re)present, signifying that they present while performing, the lives of Indigenous women. Meanwhile, they (re)create, indicating that they present while creating, the subjectivities of the artists and their communities. In doing so, Indigenous women filmmakers contextualize the structural marginalization of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously criticize patriarchal society, asserting their agency at the intersection of being Indigenous and female, claiming visibility for their lives, and denouncing the stereotypes about them that persist in wider society.

The films and videos produced by Indigenous women have the dual effect of pluralizing audiovisual experiences and engaging critically and creatively with our non-Indigenous society. The territorialized experiences portrayed in the films serve as denunciations of rights violations and as resistance in shared struggles for collective and plural life on the planet. Meanwhile, these media provide an opportunity to collectively debate our engagements both as participants in the course and also with the audiovisual productions, which is crucial for developing inclusive and participatory epistemologies, communications, and politics toward a plural future. These Indigenous artists make these possible futures visible and sensorially tangible. Their creative and diverse artworks not only proliferate voices and images, formats, and styles but also critique their dual exclusion as Indigenous and as women while proactively proposing a move beyond the individualistic non-Indigenous ideology toward a collectively shared life. The bodies depicted in the artworks are plural and mutable, as are the connections between these bodies and multiple physical and audiovisual territories. In the words of the Potiguara writer Graça Graúna, “Because we are one of many, we are here, in the midst of great transformations, confident in what is happening now, our dreams will return to reality. We are attentive to the horizons” (2014, 56).

1I have completed all translations from Portuguese to English.

Paride Bollettin has been working with the Mebengokré Indigenous people in the Amazon for two decades. He holds a PhD in social anthropology and currently works as an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Masaryk University (Czech Republic), a permanent professor in the graduate program in social sciences at the State University of São Paulo (Brazil), and as the scientific director of the Ethnographic Museum of the Centro Studi Americanistici (Italy).