The body re-exists and insists. It is never a closed envelope, but a channel of passage and trance among the most diverse spiritual dimensions (Obatala Film). Film-devotion, film-offering, film-gift. Shot in the mythical Ile-Ife, the sacred city of the Yoruba people and founded by the Orisas, this film seeks to sensory affirm the vertigo of coming into contact with Obatala, orisa creator of the world, of light. Trance of sparks of light, of bodies in spiritual connection. (Sebastian Wiedemann)

In this film, I talk about the bookshop, and what is the bookshop? Nothing but a big forest turned into stories, the books are parts of trees. The leaves of the trees, the pages of the books. And the book is the bark of the tree transformed into stories that enchant us, that touch us, that we share, from which we learn. And for bookshops and fiction to exist, we need trees. The possibility of reforesting so that our stories remain free. We still need what is natural. To become more like trees. To pick up a book and read under a tree. Learn from the trees. (Denilson Baniwa)

Portuguese spoken, English subtitles

A highly sensorial and audiovisually inventive film that rethinks its own form to find ways to enliven a precarious and largely unwritten history. Apiyemiyekî? takes as its starting point the archive of Brazilian educator and Indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade, which contains over 3000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon, during their first literacy process. The drawings are animated onto a landscape haunted by a violence, shedding light on the genocidal crimes committed against the indigenous communities during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Portuguese spoken, English subtitles

A lyrical dive into the sacred words of the prayer Valdomiro Flores about the original territory and the Kaiowá way of being. (Aldeia LAB)

Portuguese spoken, English subtitles

Like Ty ty - memórias de beija flor, this short video by Denilson Baniwa projects the violence of colonisation onto an urban context, positing the transformed, devoted forest as a site of reinvention. Denilson Baniwa is an indigenous artist who was born in the village of Darí, in Rio Negro, Amazonas. He is an anthropophagous artist who he appropriates Western languages to decolonize them in his work.

Portuguese spoken, English subtitles

A camera calligraphy of the coastal bush at Bouddi, NSW. This film springs from a strong attachment to the Australian bush landscape, an echo of the spirit of kinship that imbued the life of the Aboriginal tribes. The film is a camera calligraphy moving through the bush, capturing textures, surfaces, shadows and light, details of foliage and expanses of rocks and trees, insects and birds — it sees the bush in much the same way as Aboriginal hunters may have seen it, moving rapidly through it. The complexity of the images is repeated in the Aboriginal music, visuals and sounds forming a rhythmic pattern. (ACMI)