A Maya K’iche Exploring the Berlin International Film Festival
By Lucia Ixchiu
These are some of my thoughts on my first visit to the European film market:
For decades, we were led to believe that it was impossible for Indigenous women to make films, as if we did not come from a millennial, ancestral tradition of storytelling. The most surprising thing of all is that we believed it, but in the midst of it all, with slow but steady steps, these imaginaries built on ignorance are being dismantled.
On February 11, the Berlin International Film Festival began. We were invited as a film project and as If Not Us Then Who to participate in order to explore the market and understand how the industry works, which undoubtedly left us with many insights and perspectives on the subject.
The film industry is huge and moves very fast. The idea is not to get lost in it, not to let it use us, but rather us to use it. There are other ways to relate to each other, to get to know each other, and to make the film industry different.
This experience helped me greatly to understand the importance of creating our own spaces within indigenous cinema, creating spaces for exchange between production companies, and reimagining that what has been called the film market can be different. We had little time between visits, meetings, and screenings, and this is what working in cinema is like, but I am a storyteller, of the long account, of the time of no time, I immerse myself in the experience that initially paralyzed me in order to try to understand.
I also come from a different kind of cinema, a cinema that is not commonly found in these places, a cinema with a different kind of audience and a different kind of space, of exchange. I come from other movie theaters, where the screen is different.
I come from barefoot cinema, where we are disputing the hegemony of how stories are told, and for this, aesthetics are very important. Aesthetics in the industry is almost everything, but aesthetics was imposed by others. We are creating our own in what they have called good cinema.
Written by Lucia Ixchiu
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