NCLAFF: Forest Mind w/ short film Polinizadorxs

Forest Mind is directed by Ursula Biemann, Inga Community. Colombia/Ecuador. 2021. 31 min. Spanish and Inga with English subtitles. Free and open to the public.

Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, the project takes an eco-centric worldview. To bring their shamanic science of Ayahuasca in dialog with the Western-scientific perspective, the film explores new methodologies. With modern science adopting a predominantly mechanistic take on the living world, and Indigenous peoples experiencing an animate natural territory imbued with a spiritual dimension, these distinct cosmologies were considered vastly incompatible for the longest time. The shamans insist on the existence of animate essences which are common to all life forms. DNA technology is the Western approach to understanding the all-encompassing interconnection of life. Hence the film collapses the distinction between life and its forms of audiovisual representations. Shamanic, scientific, and artistic practices have each found their own way to access the genetic message.

Polinizadorxs: Resistencia en la Península de Yucatán is directed by Lilia Torres. Mexico 2022. 74 min. Sopanish and Yucatec Maya with English subtitles.

From a sentimental-thoughtful perspective, the documentary gathers the words of some inhabitants of the Yucatan Peninsula, collected at different points of the seven sections of the megaproject called Tren Maya. In dialogue with nature, the inhabitants express their relationship with the territory, the threats it currently faces and their perspective on what would happen if the "Iron Serpent" were to arrive. The testimonies, given in symbolic spaces for those who defend life, take us into an intimate universe of concerns about the devastation caused by the current development model and its amplification if the megaproject were to be implemented. Messages ready to spread through the words of these pollinators of resistance.