Film Screenings with Filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán

Reception with food and drinks, a screening of three short films by Laura Huertas Millán, and a panel discussion with the filmmaker.

Join us for a spring reception celebrating the Amazon Lab's first year at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Due to the limitations imposed by the pandemic, this will be our first event with food and drinks. We will make up for the lost time and share the Lab's ongoing activities and future plans.

Following the reception, there will be a screening of three short films by Laura Huertas Millán and a panel discussion with the filmmaker.

Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist. Her award-winning work combines ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical enquiries. Her work also engages with strategies of survival, resistance and resilience against violence. Sensuous and immersive, her films propose embodied and emotional experiences where aesthetics and politics are indissociable.

Panelists: Laura Huertas Millán, Esther Gabara (Romance Studies - Duke), and Josh Gibson (Cinematic Arts - Duke), with moderator, Gustavo Furtado (Romance Studies - Duke)

Program:

5:30pm - Reception with dinner and drinks at The Ruby (outdoor courtyard in back)

7:00 - Screening of three short films (descriptions below) (location: Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater)

8:15 - Panel discussion and Q&A with Laura Huertas Millán

Journey to a Land Otherwise Known (2012, 23 minutes)

Drawing on the diaries of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Hans Staden, Jean de Léry, Charles de la Condamine and others, this film reflects on the imaginary of first European contacts with exotic places and people in the tropics. The film's narration is accompanied by images shot at the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, a building constructed in 1970 by Jean-Pierre Secq.

El laberinto (The Labyrinth, 2018, 21 minutes)

El laberinto follows the labyrinthine memories of the film narrator who was involved in the spectacular rise and fall of drug lords in the Colombian Amazon.

Jiíbie (2019, 24 minutes)

The elaboration ritual of a green coca powder (called mambe or Jíibie) unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. In the Muina-Muruí Amazonian community the coca plant is not a product, but a sacred interlocutor, the beating heart of a collective body

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