Kukama Runa: Polyphonic Aesthetics in Cine Comunitario Among the Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador

Abstract

SUMMARY This essay describes a collective experience of cine comunitario (community cinema) as a humanistic method for (re)telling narratives, for working in a polyphonic audiovisual mode, and for transmitting ontological perspectives of life, poetics, and communitas to diverse audiences. Specifically, we share our story of a collective journey, that of making the Kichwa film Kukama Runa, a 36‐minute fictional work based on a Napo Runa myth.

The Hummingbird House: Indigenous Pedagogies and Cultural Revitalization in Quito, Ecuador

“…Fidel Tubino differentiates interculturalism that has continuing ties to neoliberally grounded diversity multiculturalism from “critical interculturalism,” which he characterizes as an ethical‐political project that involves decolonization and the vindication and exercise of collective rights (Tubino 2007, 14‐15; see also Vélez 2008). Very different examples of the application of critical interculturalism might be found in the study conducted by Patricio Guerrero (2017) and his team (one of whom once taught at Mensajero del Saber) in Catzuquí de Velasco, located in the periurban area of Quito, and in a community cinema project carried out by in the Ecuadorian lowland Napo area among Kichwa speakers (Bermúdez and Uzendoski 2018).…”