Culturas Indígenas

Camino a la Escuela

Umberto Zaco
Peru 2004 | 18 Min. | DVD, OmeU
This film doc­u­ments the harsh living con­di­tions and poor state of public edu­ca­tion in the cold Peru­vian high­lands (over 4000 meters above sea level) for a female school teacher and … read more

Kene Yuxi, the twists of Kene

Brazil 2010 | 48 Min. | DVD, OmeU
When trying to revert the tra­di­tions aban­don­ment of his people and fol­low­ing his father research, the teacher and writer Joaquim Maná, Zez­in­ho Yube runs after the tra­di­tion­al art­works knowl­edge of … read more

Pïrinop, My first Contact

Karané Txicão, Mari Côrea
Brazil 2007 | 80 Min. | miniDV, OmeU
The Amer­i­c­as “first con­tact” is widely rec­og­nized as having occurred in 1492. For the Ikpeng indige­nous people in Brazil, first con­tact was a doc­u­ment­ed event that occurred in Octo­ber 1964 … read more

Requecho, A Thousand Years Later

Umberto Zaco
Peru 2009 | 50 Min. | miniDV, OmeU
Los Uros, the people who for thou­sands of years have been living float­ing over the cold 43 waters of lake Tit­i­ca­ca, are upon the brink of dis­ap­pear­ing. A def­i­nite con­flict … read more

Secrets of the Tribe

José Padilha
Brazil 2010 | 94 Min. | DigiBeta, OmeU

Direc­tor José Padil­ha’s eye­open­ing new doc­u­men­tary cen­ters on the pop­u­lar field of Yanoma­mi Indian stud­ies, but they aren’t the tribe in ques­tion. The secrets being exposed are those of the tribe of intel­lec­tu­als and aca­d­e­mics who have built their rep­u­ta­tions and careers by study­ing the Yanoma­mi. Anthro­pol­o­gists descend­ed on the remote tribe begin­ning in the 1960s, believ­ing them to be the per­fect exam­ple of a pure, untouched, prim­i­tive soci­ety. But the career making oppor­tu­ni­ties that the research pro­vid­ed quick­ly led to decades of petty squab­bles which esca­late from accu­sa­tions of aca­d­e­m­ic fraud to shock­ing alle­ga­tions of med­ical, eth­i­cal, and sexual trans­gres­sions. As the sever­i­ty of the accu­sa­tions increas­es. Padil­ha skill-fully inter­weaves archival footage and ever-increas­ing amounts of tes­ti­mo­ny from the Yanoma­mi them­selves to con­firm or debunk the anthro­pol­o­gists’ state­ments. Using this clever tech­nique to reveal the anthro­pol­o­gists’ egos and incon­sis­ten­cies, SECRETS OF THE TRIBE chal­lenges the viewer to ques­tion the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and colo­nial nature of indige­nous research with­out offer­ing any easy answers. 

Trans-Cutucú - Zurück in den Urwald

Lisa Faessler
Ecuador 2009 | 89 Min. | DVD, OmeU
The moun­tain massif of Cutucú in the south of the Amazon region in Ecuador was a kind of defense against the envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion for the native pop­u­la­tion but in the … read more