Documentary - La Gente de la Tierra ''The People of the Earth''

La Gente de la Tierra is a 6 part documentary film that I made in Peru with my film partner Ben Keller in 2017. We collaborated with the many people from the 6 communities as well as a number of other Peruvian and international artists, musicians, and activists.  

The full documentary is about 1 hour and 20 minutes, split up into 10-15 minute segments. Please at least watch the first ''Chapter'' for this blog post and the others if you are interested.
 Click the link below to watch the film, the password for the private link is ''lagente''

Documentary link

The documentary explores the different ways in which the Earth itself influences the art, culture, and spirituality of these diverse communities and people across Peru. It seeks to do so in a way that lets the people themselves share their own stories and in production we aimed to let them lead the way with the stories and themes that they think are important for themselves and important to share with the world. Throughout we often see relationship with earth and environment gendered with terms such as Pachamama (Mother Earth) and Mamacocha (Lake Mother) and others common. We also see many themes of development and globalization appear in these remotes communities and the lives of the interviewees, in the shape of industrial fishing or illegally mined gold ultimately being sold to Apple inc. 

Each of the chapters share interesting insights and thoughts on globalization and relationship with the earth. The idea of the series came about as I was studying abroad in Peru, I met many people that had very different understandings of the earth and our relationship to it than I had. Peruvian friends would talk about the earth like a living being and a family member, an original mother. One day I was in a cafe talking with the owner and I asked her about the large painting in her cafe that depicted a mountain range in the form of a woman laying down. She told me, ''Yes, the painting shows that we are the people of the earth, we are not simply living on top of it, but we come from the earth itself. She is our original mother.'' 

This sent me into pondering my own relationship with the earth and reflecting on the fact that as a species we are killing our earth, our original grand mother. In many cities and western culture, people do not have this same understanding of the earth and I thought, how can this manner of thinking be spread across the world to promote cultural and ecological conservation? There is so much gloom and doom and scientific projections about the state of our earth, but I believe that that those things will not really change people's opinions. I think that taking an aesthetically appealing, and emotionally focused approach that focus on setting positive examples for earth relationship is what will really cause global change. This documentary is an attempt to do that. So I set about gathering a team to create an audiovisual story and artfully display what it could mean to live with the earth in a positive and reverent way. The idea is to present windows into the lives of people that have intimate and respectful relationships with the earth in the hope that the audience reflect on their own relationship with the earth. That said, not everything is perfect, and there exist dualities and imperfections in the lives of these people in terms of relationship with earth and in other ways. We all share much more in common than we have differences. We are all one.

In terms of gender and development, this film is not focused on those things explicitly but they definitely come through in many ways. I also must admit my team's positionality in the creation of this film, we were a small three to four person crew, mostly American and all men and we were not able to include as many voices of women as we would have liked. Additionally, as a first time director and producer there are many lessons that I learned along the way and will do differently in future projects in filming and editing. That said there are lots of interesting things to be analyzed in terms of gender in this documentary. In the first chapter we hear from the Andean Quechuan women who's tradition of weaving runs deeply through their families heritage and how different types of weaving, symbols, and clothing indicates many things about their relationship status, where they are from, and the family groups they belong to. Their artistry and skills are incredible. There are many other gender relations things to be noted and relationships to development in this chapter and throughout the film.

The film goes through theses communities: Chapter 1: the Quechua community of Pitukiska in the high Andes about 7 hours outside of Cusco in their celebration of the Andean Agricultural New Year. Chapter 2: Weavers and descendants of the Incans in the Sacred Valley explore their heritage and a family of salt gathers practice their unique, millenia old tradition of collecting salt from their terraformed evaporation pools. Chapter 3: Deep in the Amazon rainforest, plant healers of the Shipibo-Konibo community practice their ancient medicine and healing and discuss their unique art and songs of healing. Chapter 4: the last fishermen practicing their ancient fishing technique reflect on their ancestors potentially being the first surfers in the world. Chapter 5: Gold miners that live in the highest city on earth pray for protection in the mines. Chapter 6: Fisherman that live on the floating islands of reed on lake titicaca share their unique way of life.

A disclaimer is that this is a draft and the final version is still being edited.

Additionally, if interested in learning more or connecting with any of the communities, here is a link to the website- https://www.lagentedelatierra.com/