Friday, November 23

Innis College – Town Hall

3 – 5 p.m

 

 

Presented by the National Museum of the American Indian

 

 

PROJECT SUMMARY

 

In celebration of the historic evolution of autonomous Native voices in media making in Bolivia, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) will collaborate with “Alma Boliviana” and “Comite Pro-Bolivia,” both of which are community-based Latino youth and culture organizations in suburban Washington, D.C., to present OJO DEL CONDOR, a showcase of fictional and documentary videos from Bolivia, in the Spring of 2002.

 

We will host 3 of the many Indigenous filmmakers in Bolivia who produce their works through CEFREC (Cinematography Education and Production Center). Together with CEFREC, the filmmakers established a national indigenous media initiative that has attracted worldwide acclaim for its community training process as well as its video and digital productions. Screening sites will include: the NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center in Washington, D.C.; a cultural center and high school in the Bolivian community in the Virginia/Washingon area; the George Gustav Heye Center (GGHC); New York University, and a Bolivian community setting in the New York metropolitan area.

 

We will showcase the current expressions of Andean and Amazonian narrative and image-making through the work of the national indigenous media plan and the coordination initiative known as CAIB (Coordinadora Audiovisual Indigena), both of which are part of a project that is unique in Latin America. Since no publication in English currently exists about these cinema developments, we will also publish website and other materials as well as work with Radio Bilingue to produce a radio component of the program.

 

The Bolivian community in the northeastern United States often builds its cultural events around traditional music, songs, and dances; our primary goal is to complement these with a selection of contemporary narratives and documentaries by emerging film directors from Bolivia, many of whose unique storytelling styles are founded on -- and interwoven with -- the discrete cultural traditions of their Native communities. The program can provide the youth in the US-based community a sense of connectedness to not only their cultural traditions, but also to the “newness” explicit in filmmaking, and therefore their culture’s process of innovation and contemporary creativity. It will also permit them to share with other Latino and non-Latino audiences a strong sense of the modern indigenous world.