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Nine years ago, at 14, Livia Silvano learned to use a video camera in the community hall of her neighborhood, in the lower area of Belén, in the Peruvian Amazon. Since she was a child, she had participated with her mother in workshops that used art to create and address complex issues such as childhood or gender violence, facilitated by popular educators in the city.
In Iquitos, the largest city in the world without road access, there is no film school. In fact, there is no public film school in all of Peru. “We learned on the field,” says Silvano, who trained in community workshops such as those of the Canadian project Kinómada or the local Ícaro. In 2023 he won a national fund to direct Bufeoher first feature film, a story that denounces child sexual abuse, camouflaged in the Amazonian myth of the river dolphin that impregnates women.
Together with Silvano, a group of young people have become filmmakers through community cinema, assistance in national and international productions and the desire to show their Amazon. Between May 15 and 26, they organized the Muyuna Festa floating film festival to defend the world’s jungles.
In the Peruvian Amazon, the veryuna is the whirlpool that forms in the river and is also a connection with the mystical underwater world. “The gateway to the cities within,” says Leonardo Tello, Kukama communicator and director of Radio Ukumara in Nauta.
The festival began with three simultaneous short film creation workshops. “It is the opportunity to write and develop your stories,” says Silvano, who years ago participated in a similar experience. Sitting on the floor, about 20 teenagers and young people from Iquitos, Cusco, Huánuco, Lima or Puno refined their scripts, discussed their filming plans, locations, schedules and wrote them down on notes.
At the same time, on one of the boats that sail the Amazon from Pucallpa to Iquitos, eight artists participated in a four-day laboratory. They arrived for the opening of the festival and screened their short films in the port of Masusa, one of the main ports in Iquitos.
“Learning by doing is part of the way of learning in the jungle. Since we were little,” says Natalia Power, social educator, who worked with Livia Silvano when she was a child. She also accompanied the training process of filmmakers such as Luis Chumbe, who introduced Silvano to the workshops in Belén.
Daniel Martinez and Julio Blanca, co-directors of the Muyuna Fest, also found the craft of cinema in Peru and the Amazon. Both Spaniards, they arrived in Peru more than 10 years ago and together with a team of around 30 people, most of them very young, created the festival.
Indigenous cinema, Amazonian cinema
“Who owns the story?; “The one who records?” Micha Huamán, one of the facilitators in the community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu, asks Silvia Diaz, protagonist of one of the shorts. “What we have recorded is her story,” Huamán remarks.
San Antonio is located three and a half hours from Iquitos by glider. It concentrates the largest population of Ikitu origin in the region. The Pintuyacu is part of the Nanay River basin, which supplies water to Iquitos. Today it is threatened by growing illegal mining that dredges gold and washes it with mercury in the water.
Like dozens of people of her generation, Diaz left her community as a teenager, when she was taken to work in the city by a visitor. In Iquitos she was a domestic worker. She left behind her language and traditions. She returned to San Antonio in 2021 due to the pandemic. She now works on her farm and is part of the community’s culture committee. “She is like a rebirth,” says Díaz, 46, who teaches ikitu and stories of the town to the youngest. “I learn and I teach,” she says while being filmed by Cristina Benitez and Briana Paduro, 15, who listen to her story.
The short they recorded was called Ayaymama, the legend of two children abandoned by their father in the mountains, who returned home in the form of a bird. “Their music is sad,” he says of the nighttime song of 16-year-old bird Bryan Tapayuri. He is in charge of the sound. “I’m like Ayaymama,” says Diaz. She left home and returned transformed. After five days of work, the 15 workshop leaders presented three short films on the community’s soccer field. Days later, they were exhibited in the Plaza Castilla in Iquitos.
“The most important thing is to collect memories. Individual, collective, biographies,” says Leonardo Tello, who facilitated an indigenous film workshop with young Maijunas, Ikitus and Kukamas during the festival. “What is not in the church or the universities is there.” For him, it is the ineffable that gives identity to indigenous Amazonian cinema. “We indigenous people see as equal other beings who decide important things in the Amazon, but who are not human,” he says.
Stage
Livia Silvano smiles, waves her arms and shouts: “Rafita!” Rafael Silvano, whom she calls, is her father and the protagonist of her first short film. The man, who has half his body in the water, avoids the wood of the stage under construction and approaches the canoe in which they travel on the Itaya River, which floods the lower area of Belén for six months each year.
The main stage was designed by architects from the Common Space Association and built by local carpenters, led precisely by Rafael Silvano. The structure resembles stilt houses, with exposed columns and beams. For Silvano and his team, assembling the 10-meter-high structure was an arduous but familiar task. This is how they built their houses. “I learned by watching, from when I was young to 17,” says Silvano, who is now 64.
In addition to workshops, the festival included discussions and screenings in plazas, bars or one of the main cinemas in Iquitos. Over the weekend, Bethlehem families and visitors arrived in canoes to what, in the dry season, is the soccer field outside the San Francisco school. The screenings included the jury’s selection of more than 1,000 short films from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Peru, among others.
On Saturday, the attendees standing still on the canoes looked up at the screen. The singing in awuajún of an old man resounded at the screening of the Peruvian short A day of Cumbia. Belén was founded by people who came from riverside communities. The majority were indigenous people who had to deny their origin, language and customs and stopped transmitting them to future generations to avoid being discriminated against. “Why are there so many important things about the Amazon that were hidden?” asks Leonardo Tello.
During the festival, Livia Silvano met Tello, and told him about the search for her ethnicity. Tello confirmed that his origin is Kukama and that his maternal surname, Pacaya, is emblematic in his town. “Discovering that you have indigenous blood excites me a lot,” says Silvano, smiling. “I feel that in here they are no longer like butterflies, but rather like whirlpools. Like very united.”
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