SPECIAL EDITION II

1. How I learned to work. 2004.

This educational video was produced by a civil association named Melel Xojobal (“True Light” in Tsotsil) that works with indigenous children in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. The aim of this video is to think, together with the children, about their experiences of migration and adaptation to the city. How I learned to work emphasises that work is dignifying and in addition it offers a view of the inter-ethnic dynamics evolving today in a Chiapas that is increasingly multi-cultural.

2. Teklum Maya: The Alternative Tourism Network of Indigenous Peoples in Chiapas. 2003.

The purpose of this video is to promote and inform on the work of Teklum Maya, an ecological and community tourism network formed by indigenous people in Chiapas. The members of this network belong to communities and organisations in The Highlands, the Lacandon Forest, the southern border and northern regions of the state. With support from the National Indigenist Institute, these communities decided to organisation the network and offer tourist alternatives that could bring them direct economic benefits. Whilst the video shows us the natural and cultural wealth of these locations, it’s making also represented a major exercise in cultural exchange between mestizos, indigenous people and foreigners. The main challenge was finding an audiovisual language to communicate both indigenous peoples’ search of dignified employment and the tourists’ quest for ‘exotic’ indigenous peoples, spectacular landscapes and mysterious archaeological sites.

3. Batik xa ta sna’ k’ak’al. 2004.

Ilan Vingurt, an Israeli video-maker visiting Chiapas, was enchanted by the Zinacantecan rock group Sak Tzevul. Moved by the music, he decided to make a video clip that could express visually what the song Batik xa ta sna k’ak’al (“Let’s go to the House of Father Sun” in Tsotsil) made him feel. Damián Martínez, founder of Sak Tzevul and author of this song, refers to it as a “youth’s cry for freedom”, and as a call to return to pre-Hispanic Mayan cosmogony still present in the beliefs of locals today, in spite of the fact that over half of this population has now joined evangelical churches. Ilan approaches Batik xa ta sna k’ak’al with a collage of images, emphasizing the tension between natural elements and urban life.

4. Nostalgia for San Caralampio. 2004.

The first images of this video were shot in 1991 as the result of an invitation by the inhabitants of El Guanal Ejido (Lacandon Forest) to visit their community and join them in the fiesta for their patron saint (San Caralampio). These visits were repeated in 1992 and 1993. Later in 1994, when the Zapatista uprising took place, the community split and some of its inhabitants left to settle in a marginal neighbourhood in the town of Ocosingo. This video tells of the nostalgia felt by the former inhabitants of El Guanal, now urbanisationd, for the “promised land” they had found in the rainforest. The video includes footage from the festivity of San Caralampio as celebrated in Ocosingo in 2002 by the exiled population and recorded by young members of their community. The video tells of the pain and desperation produced by the rupture of the community and takes us from evergreen rainforest to a concrete urban jungle, revealing how, in the new context, nostalgia contributed to the rescue and reinvention of the “San Caralampio tradition” in spite of the unresolved military and political conflict.