Martírio Screening

NYU Washington, DC and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, in collaboration with Vídeo nas Aldeias, presented an advance screening of Martírio.

The film documents the situation of the Guarani­ Kaiowá, an indigenous people living in southern Brazil amongst the highest incidence of anti-indigenous violence, at its most critical point in over a hundred years of struggles with the government and agricultural interests.  Co-director Tatiana Almeida offered a Q&A session after the screening. 

MARTÍRIO 

From the starting point that every film is political, longtime activist and film director Vincent Carelli documents the struggle of the Guarani-Kaiowá in southern Brazil: a group of indigenous people that fear their lands will be confiscated by the State. An ongoing territorial conflict born more than one hundred years ago, during the Paraguay war. While fighting against the Brazilian Congress in order not to be evicted from their homes, the 50,000 indigenous people demand the demarcation of the space that belongs to them. Through rigorous investigative work, the director tells in his own voice of the social and political injustices suffered by the Guarani people through material he filmed over the course of more than forty years. The archival images, both color and black and white, reveal the crudeness with which they coexist every day: among the violation of their civil rights and the sheer strength with which they confront the usurpers.

162 min., 2016, Brazil

Tatiana Almeida

Tatiana Almeida is a filmmaker and video editor. Among her major works as editor are Avenida Brasília Formosa and As Aventuras de Paulo Bruscky, both directed by Gabriel Mascaro; Balsa, a medium-length directed by Marcelo Pedroso; and the video installations O Peixe, O Levante, 4.000 disparos and Pacífico, all directed by artist Jonathas de Andrade.

Rafaella Ruiz

Rafaella Ruiz is a filmmaker and photographer. She studied Cinema and Television at Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She collaborates with Vídeo nas Aldeias since 2013, and is now in charge of film distribution and archiving.

Video nas Aldeias/Video in the Villages

The VNA project emerged from the NGO Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Indigenist Working Center), led by Vincent Carelli among the Nambiquara people. When the communities watched their filmed images, a great collective mobilization took place. Taking this experience to other groups led to a a series of videos about how each people adopted video in a specific, different way. In 1997, Vídeo nas Aldeias began its training program for indigenous filmmakers, with the first workshop given in the Xavante village of Sangradouro, and then in other villages. 

VNA began distributing video and projection equipment to communities and creating a network of circulation for the videos that were being made in this context. VNA became more and more of a film school and a production center for indigenous peoples. From the “Indian Program” (aired in 1995), to the “Indigenous Filmmakers Collection  (DVD collection, released in 2008), and through dozens of workshops carried out in association with NGOs and Indigenous organizations, a shared audiovisual production is at the heart of the project´s concerns. In 2000, VNA became an independent NGO. The result has been the creation of important visual archives on indigenous peoples in Brazil, and the production of over 70 films, many of which have received national and international awards. In September of 2017, Vincent Carelli was chosen as a Prince Claus Principal Laureate.