The Center for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies invites you to the screening of
London as a Village
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Talk with film maker Takumã Kuikuro
Moderated by Prof. Paul Heritage (Queen Mary University of London)
Date and time: Wednesday 24 February 2016, 6pm-7pm
Location: Birkbeck Cinema, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
All are welcome, no booking is required bbk.ac.uk/cilavs/events
In April 2015, film maker Takumã Kuikuro travelled all the way from his village, set within the Xingu Indigenous Territory (North Brazil), to the UK to take up a challenge from People’s Palace Projects: to spend a month in London producing and directing a film that would capture his vision of the city as a “village”. Takumã was selected from dozens of applicants through a grant scheme called Culture Connection Brazil, promoted by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture with the support of British Council and the Transform Programme. He was commissioned to record London from an indigenous perspective, exploring similarities and differences between his Kuikuro culture and the Londoners he christened “the Hyper-Whites”. The result is a captivating and humorous anthropological documentary about western society and the many villages hidden under the skyscrapers of London.
Internationally recognised filmmaker Takumã is a member of the Kuikuro people, and grew up in the Ipatse village within the Alto Xingú Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso state, central Brazil. Aged 18, he was introduced to a group of anthropologists studying the villages, and became keen to learn Portuguese. It was through the anthropologists’ documentary team that he also discovered a passion: filmmaking. Through the project Video nas Aldeias – a film project that trains indigenous people to document their society and culture through images, founded by anthropologist Vicente Carelli, – Takumã started to shoot, direct and edit films about his village’s day to day activities, rituals and oral stories. His films started to spread quickly across Brazil and internationally, and soon he was presenting them in both local and international Festivals. He was acclaimed for films such as The Day the Moon Menstruated, The Hyperwomen and Kariokas. Takumã became an Associate Artist of People’s Palace Projects in Autumn 2015.