BELÉN, Peru In the heart of Peru’s Amazon region, a poor indigenous community set aside the trials and tribulations of everyday life and celebrated an international film festival featuring works from tropical forest countries.
Many of those who attended the 10-day event had never seen a film on the big screen, and the film used for the festival was unique due to the region’s geography.
“The festival aims to be a tribute to the world’s jungles and their people, to indigenous communities, in which we believe that the answer to the challenges and destruction that forests face now that everyone is talking about climate change lies,” Daniel Martínez -Quintanilla , co-executive director of the festival that ends Sunday, said.
Life in the Belén community revolves around water. Homes and businesses are built on stilts because rains regularly cause months-long floods. Families have canoes to move around, but children who don’t have one sometimes use large plastic containers.
So members of the Muyuna Floating Film Festival — muyuna in Quechua means “a whirlpool formed in raging rivers” — installed the screen on a 10-meter-high wooden structure, allowing residents to enjoy films from their own eyes. canoes or in the windows of their homes.
“For the first time, we are experiencing these environments that bring us to this community,” said Belén resident Jorge Chilicahua, a 60-year-old farmer who raises chickens and grows cassava, corn and vegetables to meet his family’s needs. . He never went to the cinema.
Much of Belén’s population comes from rural areas of the Peruvian Amazon and is part of several indigenous groups, including the Kukama, Yagua and Bora, who migrated in search of better economic, educational and health opportunities. Its challenges are abundant.
People fish by making holes in the wooden floors of their houses, which forces mothers to keep an eye on their children who don’t yet know how to swim so that they don’t fall into the water and drown. Health authorities reported that malnutrition and diarrhea are common due to a lack of clean water.
Martínez-Quintanilla said the event included films from Thailand, Brazil, Taiwan, Panama and other tropical forest countries, as well as others made by young Peruvians.
Among the works shown is the Peruvian animated short film “The Engine and the Melody”, which tells the story of an ant that cuts down Amazonian trees and a cicada that manages to regenerate the forest by playing a prodigious flute – until everything changes when a forest fire occurs.
___
Briceño reported from Lima, Peru.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
