Indigenous cinema and education: through the Ápa river and the fire that never goes out

Abstract

This text is part of a research on Brazilian indigenous cinema carried out by a university student belonging to the Guarani people, into the catalogs of the Projeto Vídeo nas Aldeias and the Association of Indigenous Directors (Ascuri). The research was carried out during the pandemic and involved selecting films from catalogs, analyzing some of them and holding dialogues with high school and higher education students in the form of online film debates. Studying and talking about the films were movements triggered by a concern experienced as an indigenous person at the university: the urgent need to combat the stereotypes built during centuries of colonization about indigenous peoples. For this writing in the form of an essay, we chose one of the research movements about the encounter between the student's life story and two films produced by Ascuri, directed by director Terena Gilmar Galanche from Mato Grosso do Sul: “Pirakuá, the guardians of Rio Ápa” (2014) and “Panambizinho, the fire that never goes out” (2014). The stories of the characters in the films and the ancestries of the student researcher mix and reveal the ways of being, living and resisting the Guarani people in the territories of Mato Grosso do Sul and anywhere they are.