Sensing Indigenous Cosmology in Río Verde: El tiempo de los Yakurunas

• In Event: ¿Nuestra Amazonía?: Mediated Claims to Ownership and Belonging in Amazonian Studies

Abstract

Featured in last year’s LASA Film Festival, Río Verde: El tiempo de los Yakurunas (2017) is the result of an extended period of immersion in the Peruvian Amazon and offers viewers a correspondingly immersive cinematic experience. But Quechua directors Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento resist providing easily consumable knowledge about the forest they purport to document. Marked by the absence of dialogue, a clear narrative, or expository tropes, their film conceals more than it reveals in its representation of Amazonian indigenous communities. Yet, I argue, it is in this absence that another presence emerges: the entanglements between human and non-human worlds that constitute the forest and that the film conveys both visually and aurally. This sensorial approach allows the film to mediate shamanic visions about the joint spiritual life of plants and people. Using primary interviews with the directors to explore the aesthetics of this rendering of indigenous cosmology, I raise key questions of access and ownership of knowledge in the context of Amazonia’s extractivist histories.

Author

• Martina Broner, Cornell University