Film screening: God is a Woman & Indexed Beings. Including a discussion with Cebaldo de Leon, Olowaili Green, Helen Knowles and Manuel Mueses.

This event is organised by SIGICS and Cinemaattic, with support from the Flourish Fund (Durham), as part of Latin Connections. Gunadule filmmaker Olowaili Green is visiting Scotland as a co-researcher on the RSE-funded project Disputed Histories and Heritages, led by Charlotte Gleghorn at the University of Edinburgh, while developing her new film Suggunya, which tells the history of the Darién Scheme from the perspective of the Guna Dule people, narrated as an audiovisual mola. This event will also take place in Edinburgh. Click here for more information.

About the films:

God is a Woman, directed by Andrés Peyrot and produced by Duiren Wagua, is a documentary that follows the journey of the Guna Indigenous people as they recover a long-lost film made about them in the 1970s. What begins as a quest to retrieve missing footage unfolds into a powerful meditation on cultural memory, representation, and the right of Indigenous peoples to reclaim their own image.

In 1975, French Oscar-winning filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau travelled to Panama to document the Guna. Decades later, the film had become a legend — spoken of but never seen. When director Andrés Peyrot uncovers the forgotten reels and returns them to the community, God Is a Woman becomes not only a documentary, but a moving reunion between a people and their own recorded history.

This screening will also feature two short films by Olowaili Green Santacruz: Mugan boe (The Cry of the Grandmothers) and the music video Canción sin miedo (Fearless Song).

Indexed Beings is a 42-minute artist film by Helen Knowles, created in collaboration with the indigenous Kamëntsá, Inga, Cofan, and Siona communities in Mocoa, Putumayo, Colombia. The work re-enacts a real dispute between a scientist and a local taita (shaman) at the Herbario Etnobotánico del Piedemonte, exploring contrasting worldviews on plant life. For the scientist, the herbarium protects biodiversity and territory; for the taita, plants are sentient beings that cannot be classified. Through performance and dialogue, the film questions how scientific knowledge changes when we recognise more-than-human intelligence, and asks whose knowledge truly counts.

Indexed Beings has been developed with staff at the Herbario Ethnobotanico del Piedemonte based in Mocoa, Putumayo, Colombia with: Director, Jorge Contreras, members of Colectivo Selvas Vivas, Puerto Guzman, Manuel Mueses; Centro Etnobotanico, director and founder of Sana que Sana alongside members of the Kamëntsá, Inga, Cofan and Siona community who are indigenous to the territory of Putumayo, Colombia.

Programme:

14:00 – 14:10: Welcome and introduction.
14:10 – 14:20: Mugan boe (4 min) & Canción sin miedo (4 min).
14:20 – 15:50: God is a Woman (86 min).
15:50 – 16:20: Discussion with Cebaldo de Leon and Olowaili Green.
16:20 – 16:35: Coffee break.
16:35 – 17:20: Indexed Beings (42 min).
17:20 – 17:50: Discussion with Helen Knowles and Manuel Mueses.