10 · 23 · 08

Best Indigenous Film in the Filmoteca

Clara Sánchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

[imagen]On Tuesday, October 21 in the afternoon there was a screening of the film that won the first Best Indigenous Film Prize at the Morelia International Film Festival at the National Filmoteca.

After the screening of the winning short film, El lugar de las nubes y algunas palabras perdidas (Snuu viko) by Nicolás Rojas, the documentary Reencuentros: entre la memoria y la nostalgia by Yolanda Cruz was also shown.

El lugar de las nubes y algunas palabras perdidas (Snuu viko) is a docu-drama that is about Emilio, a Mixtec boy who finds himself at a crossroads – he has to decide whether to continue speaking the language of his ancestors or concentrate only on Spanish. The conflict springs from social pressure, which is dominated more and more by Spanish, pulling against a return to cultural roots and preserving traditions.

At the end of the screening, Nicolás Rojas and the producer, Nefertiti Ramírez, spoke with the audience about three topics: If they had help from institutions to create the film, how long it took, and about the Mixtec language.

“Here and in Morelia, people are interested in the topic, and the fact that the film was made in an indigenous language also interests people. They like that a child guides the development of the story and the film’s intention is not a government matter but rather a society’s awareness of all that they are losing. In Oaxaca there are still 17 languages that are spoken with their variants. For us, the act of trying to revive a language is very important. It caught our attention that we prefer to speak other languages and reject our mother tongues. We need to once again put value on our roots, traditions and culture. I think that this message reached people,” Ramírez said.

The filming took around a month, “broken up into several days because we couldn’t film the whole month because it interfered with work, school, etc.,” Rojas said.

However, in order to actually finish it would take two or three more years: “We didn’t have any help, when we ran out of money, we had to stop production. We also had to stop using the music because we wanted it to be original as Nico didn’t want us to use traditional banda music. He thought that music that would be better to use would be something with chords, that would appeal more to people’s feelings, that would reach out to people,” Ramírez said.

 “Yes, because banda is not native to these villages. In Mixtepec the only music that exists are the Chilenas that come from the coastal traditions. We couldn’t use this type of music because it’s for dancing at weddings,” Rojas said.

The reason for the lack of funding was because “they liked the idea, but when we were about to start, they told us that they couldn’t do it, that the resources they had were to be used for something else. The closed the door on us, but for us it was an incentive to make something that no one else believed in. We decided that was the best reason we had to make it.”

At the end of the screening the director also talked about the Mixtec language, “they asked us if we had a way of writing in Mixtec.”