Friday December 5, 2025 | 9:00AM – 10:45AM

LBC 208 Korach

Presenters

• Hannah Palmer (Tulane University, chair and moderator)

 

• Angel Carrasco (University of Southern California) “Tío Yim: Indigenous Documentary Film as Restorative Justice”

Historically, Mexican films have portrayed Indigenous people as unintelligent, subordinate, and violent. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a shift toward different depictions in Mexican media in order to promote a diverse national culture. While laudable on the surface, this can be understood as an effort to integrate Indigenous peoples into the nation state. In the past two decades, non-Indigenous filmmakers have attempted to highlight the issues that Indigenous people face, but continue contributing to indigenous exploitation. While non-Indigenous Mexican filmmakers continue to grapple with how to represent Indigenous people in cinema, Indigenous filmmakers are using cinema as a political tool to navigate Indigenous discourse and imagine a different world.
In this paper, I focus on Tío Yim (2019) in which Zapotec filmmaker Luna Marán creates a portrait of her father, Jaime Martínez Luna (Tío Yim), by piecing together images and stories about his social leadership and his struggles with alcoholism. While this film explores the intimate story of her family, it sheds light on broader issues pertaining to Indigenous people in Oaxaca. I argue that through editing, cinematography, and sound, Marán’s filmmaking is an example of an emerging trend of Indigenous restorative justice through filmmaking. Marán reimagines what Indigenous representations in cinema can look like. She exercises her right to visual sovereignty by positioning Indigenous people in the past, present, and future (all at once) and her right to opacity by controlling how much visual and auditory information is disclosed to the audience.

• Vania Barraza (University of Memphis), “Revisions of Indigenous Repressions in Recent Historical Chilean Cinema”

Recent Chilean historical fiction has started to reexamine the nation’s founding narrative, denouncing the indigenous genocides that occurred in southern Chile during the second half of the 19th century through individual rather than collective experiences. In Rey (2017), Niles Atallah employs an experimental aesthetic to scrutinize history and filmmaking by indirectly addressing the military campaign against the Mapuche people, known as the Occupation of Araucanía (1861-1883). Similarly, both Blanco en blanco (2019), by Théo Court, and Los colonos (2023), by Felipe Gálvez Haberle, recount from personal perspectives on the events that led to the massacres of the Selk’nam, Kaweskar, Haush, Aonikenk, and Yagán peoples in Tierra del Fuego between 1880 and 1910.

In aesthetic terms, this trilogy of films revisiting 19th-century historical events concurs in visually exploring the manipulation of archival materials (both photographic and audiovisual), highlighting the invisibility of Indigenous testimonials accounting for the annihilation that sustains national founding narratives. In this cinema, Indigenous communities are portrayed with limited representations, which reaccentuates their repression, exclusion, and absence from national historical discourse. Consequently, the off-screen depiction of Indigenous peoples in this Chilean cinema reenacts what has remained outside national history, serving as a critical resource for understanding the past.

• Gerardo Pignatiello (Binghamton University-SUNY), “Historia y futurización en el cine latinoamericano del siglo XX”

Recientemente (4 de junio de 2025 en la Facultad de Artes de la UNLP), Lucrecia Martel propuso “Inventemos un futuro que nos guste”. Frente al pesimismo de autores como Mark Fisher que no podía observar sobre todo en el cine contemporáneo otras formas de futuro que no fueran apocalípticas, Martel propone la creación de un futuro optimista como algo urgente. Cuatro cineastas sudamericanos recientes, Lucrecia Martel, la dupla Ciro Guerra – Cristina Gallego y Kleber Mendonça Filho, de formas muy diferentes, comparten, sin embargo, la apelación a la historia como una manera de explicar no sólo el presente sino el futuro. El uso de momentos precisos en la historia del Virreinato del Río de la Plata, de Colombia y de Brasil genera imágenes de futuro. La capacidad de futurización, como dice Ezequiel Gatto, no está relacionada ni con la linealidad de ver el futuro como “un presente delante” ni con “el futuro como visión” (31). “La futuridad no se agota ni se realiza; más bien es la posibilidad de que algo se realice” (Gatto 31). Lo que aparece en las películas de estos directores y directoras son imágenes de futuro que o encuentran una conexión con la historia insertándose en ella, o que aparecen de modo disruptivo en el mismo pasado y crean una “compresión” del tiempo. Esta ponencia analiza este problema en las películas Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2017), Pájaros de verano (Ciro Guerra y Cristina Gallego, Colombia, 2018) y Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brasil, 2019). Futuro de la colonia agonizante, futuro indígena y narco, futuro del cangaço despertado por el invasor.