2026
~ Michał Krawczyk
This participatory documentary, set in the Andean–Amazon Piedmont of Colombia, is created by community members using phones, drones, and trail cameras. By placing cameras directly in the hands of local participants, the project foregrounds grassroots agency in both story-making and storytelling. Beyond representation, the process leaves skills, experience, and audiovisual techniques within the territory, strengthening long-term cultural autonomy through hands-on learning and creative practice.
The film moves across four intertwined strands: biodiversity mapping and reforestation practices; images of non-human life captured by trail cameras; a scientific perspective on biodiversity and ecological processes presented by a local researcher; and Indigenous perspectives on the Amazon. Bringing these strands together, the work takes an essayistic approach to the territory, placing different ways of knowing and relating to the forest into dialogue. Audiovisual images become not only a means of documenting ecological practices, but also a way of thinking through the relationships between scientific knowledge, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and lived experience of the territory. It centers Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a lived, relational, and generative practice — one that produces knowledge, relationships, and capacity for ongoing care and future action. Trail-camera footage is not treated as distant surveillance or detached observation, but as part of an ongoing practice of stewardship, where encounters with non-human life, ancestral knowledge, and contemporary technology converge in care for the land.
As co-editor Wilton Jajoy (Inga Indigenous community, San Pedro, Colón, Putumayo, Colombia) emphasizes, the film tells the story “desde el territorio” — from within the territory — reflecting Indigenous ways of being, cycles of life, and responsibility to non-human kin. The narrative privileges relational and cyclical structures: the jaguar emerges as a central figure of agency, while human and non-human presences intertwine through ecological and cultural practice.
The project explicitly challenges colonial narratives that have historically framed the Amazon as wild, empty of Indigenous presence, timeless, or available for external control and resource extraction. Rather than depicting the forest as a backdrop or object of extraction, the film presents it as a lived and governed territory shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems and active ecological management. Reforestation, community-led biodiversity mapping, and trail-camera monitoring reveal the forest as carefully tended, highlighting Indigenous authority, ecological knowledge, and stewardship.
Collaboration extends into post-production, where a local Indigenous editor co-shapes the film, creating a space of shared authorship that disrupts conventional hierarchies of cinematic authority. By weaving together Indigenous knowledge, ecological observation, scientific perspectives, and territorial practice, the film enacts a decolonial approach to storytelling, knowledge, and ecological futures. It reasserts Indigenous futurity, political agency, and epistemic authority, presenting the Amazon not as an abstract wilderness, but as a dynamic, relational, and lived territory.
Submitted and under review