“I’m going to spend another year without my son. And if my son wasn’t Indian, weren’t they going to kill him? Asks one of the women who participated in The rebellion of the flowers, the documentary about the historic occupation of the Ministry of the Interior made by 23 members of indigenous peoples in search of justice for the terricides that their nations have been suffering for five hundred years.
They did not receive them, they did not listen to thembut there, in that organism of the Argentine state, they remained eleven days waiting for a response that did not arrive, and still does not arrive.
The camera at the command of María Laura Vásquez shows at the beginning the contrast between the skyscrapers in part of the city of Buenos Aires, the place where the lives of the country’s inhabitants are decided, and the immensity of Patagonia. There are other wooded, desert, rocky, populated or full of absence territories, various ethnic groups in their habitats, from north to south and from the mountain range to the Atlantic Ocean
Vásquez is the director of other films that gave an account of the problems that different people face in their Latin American residences: When the compass marked the south, Independence Project, the libertarian spirit of a people, Chávez infinite Y The 120. The Coffee Brigade.
The revolutionary perspective of indigenous women
Their voice, the rebellious flowers, appears clear, firm, conscious, full of wisdom and questions. “I started filming 5 years ago when I met the Mapuche weychafe Moira Millán. Moira made a strong impression on me, she proposed a different and revolutionary civilizing proposal from the perspective of the original woman. As the bond deepened, I got to know the other indigenous women who share their struggle and I began to film with them, without much clarity as to what the narrative thread of the film was going to be,” says María Laura Vásquez. The rebellion of the flowers premieres on Thursday the 13th of this month at the Gaumont cinema.
“When they began to think about carrying out a peaceful occupation of the ministry to make their historically ignored claims visible, I decided to accompany them in the process,” says Vásquez, who also worked with Oliver Stone in the investigation and collection of archive material for the films. south of the border Y my friend hugo. “Thus I was recording the direct action carried out by these twenty self-convened indigenous people from territories in conflict, and I was with them the 11 days of the occupation, in October 2019. This fact became the central story of the film, clearly reflected in concrete situations all the issues, conflicts and struggles that have accompanied the existence of indigenous women since the arrival of the invader. Each scene was an echo within an echo, scenes repeated endlessly for more than five centuries.”
“The nations from which the sisters came are Tapiete, Qom, Mapuche, Mbya, Guaraní and Mociví. Each community has its own social structures and particular conflicts that arose during the occupation (institutional violence, looting and territorial destruction by extractivist companies, lack of access to justice) what encompasses everyone is an absent state or one that only appears at electoral times, which strips them of their territories and for this very reason the communities are increasingly impoverished. If we talk about the pre-existing nations, before the conquest, the role of women, the social form of the communities was diverse but a large part of them lived in a harmonious way and without social stratification, except for the Incas, who were an empire before that peripheral capitalism arrived. When the invader disembarks, social stratification is installed in our native peoples, they are classified as humans with cheap labor, almost like animals, like the Africans, a genocide is generated that hardly anyone talks about.
How did women live before the European discovery-cover-up?
–Regarding the role of women, it is a complex question, if the patriarchy is ancestral or not, or if it came with the imposed European culture. Rita Segato says that there is an ancestral part and another not, there are different positions. In what there is agreement between the original women and those who have a more sociological and anthropological vision is that patriarchy, machismo, as we know them today, the one that the Europeans managed to install, is a high-intensity patriarchy that did not exist before their arrival in Latin America. Not with the vehemence as tremendous as we know it today. Original women fight against intra-community and outward machismo. Capitalism impoverished the original nations with the dispossession of their lands by landowners and extractivist companies.
Do you believe in the objectivity of the documentary genre or is there a diversity of aesthetics according to each filmmaker?
–I do not define an aesthetic to capture before the situation, this film has two very different treatments, one that is very virtuous at the image and sound level, which was when I was able to be in Moira’s community, its territoriality, with another type of temporality and with a more controlled shooting, where the attempt was to capture the immensity and beauty of the world that we have at risk at this time. But the specific fact of the peaceful occupation of the ministry was very marked by the situation. 80 percent of the time I worked alone, I was with a 50-millimeter lens, which was the brightest I had, and with a microphone hanging from my neck, and that was how I was able to access the precarious situation., but it determined a closeness with the sisters and having so much knowledge that it allows a level of intimacy from the camera to the record that seems like one more sister that is sharing with them. I let reality penetrate me and let my body and my camera permeate what that reality proposes and where I feel that what I am perceiving as the most important thing of the moment can be captured with the greatest expressiveness possible, in that part it is a fairly emotional and observational in relation to the development that is taking place.
The filmmaker says that what calls her is “to seek alternatives to the neoliberal capitalist processes that have taken place in our region, that’s why I always dedicated myself to political and historical documentaries, where I tried to make a record of emancipatory processes in Latin America.” Born in La Plata, province of Buenos Aires in 1976, she studied Combined Arts at the University of Buenos Aires, at the Institute of Cinematographic Art of Avellaneda (IDAC) and graduated as a filmmaker at the San Antonio International Film and Television School. from Los Banos, Cuba. Between Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Cuba, she has made more than 20 cultural and political-social documentaries and has produced television programs within the same documentary theme. Between 2000 and 2011 he settled in Venezuela, where he worked for the National Cinematheque directing Cinema TV, for the National Council of Culture (CONAC) in the Mobile Audiovisual Production Units, for La Villa del Cine, in charge of documentary feature films, and for different national television channels making documentary series. Since mid-2011 she lives in Buenos Aires. She worked in the direction, script, production and camera of several series for the channels Encuentro, Paka Paka, TecTV, Telesur and in the production of archive and script of several films released in cinemas.
The beginning of oppression
The theme of the original peoples appeared “inevitably” in all his films in a lateral way, “because if we analyze our history, the beginning of the current oppression is at the beginning of the arrival of the conquest and colonization, inequality, genocide , extractivism, which has always been a very important element in my stories, but has never been central until now. When I met Moira and this civilizing process of her proposal, which she proposes as an alternative, the analysis she makes of native women and the importance that resistance has had, for me it was a convoking, mobilizing, stimulating axis ”.
What expectations does the reception of the film arouse in you?
–I intend that what happened with some people who already saw it, who wondered ‘And why didn’t I find out about this occupation, what was I doing at that time, why didn’t I go to support them?’ I intend to sow a grain of sand from these 500 years of struggle of indigenous women in resistance and that challenges us as a society and that we understand that our history did not begin 500 years ago with the arrival of the ships, nor two hundred years ago with the start of the national state, but that we have 14,500 years before, of original peoples full of wisdom, of spirituality, from whom we have much to learn, more so at this time that they are at risk.
you premiere The rebellion of the flowers and you are already moving forward with a new documentary, what is it about?
–I am about to start the post-production of Alina Sánchez, an Argentine who studied medicine in Cuba and who went to fight for the revolution in Kurdistan, in Asia Minor, led by women. She dedicated her life to that revolution and as a doctor she was very important in that region, she was a kind of health minister who managed a health project for the town. Her work was very important. In 2018 she died in an accident and at this moment Alina is a very important martyr for the people, for Kurdish women, she is a current Che Guevara for them and them. Her story is not known and the idea is to search for it through all those who knew her. That’s why she’s called In search of Lejerin, which was the name she adopted in Kurdistan. We are starting the edition now and I think that at the beginning of next year it will be finished.
days and duties The rebellion of the flowers:
SAN MARTIN CULTURAL CENTER. Sarmiento 1551:
Friday 10/14 7pm
Sunday 10/16 7pm
Saturday 10/22 7pm
Sunday 10/23 5pm
Saturday 10/29 7pm
Sunday 10/30 5:00 p.m.
GAUMONT CINEMA.
From October 13 to 19, every day at 7:30 p.m.