Events › Brazilian Screenings: Ava Yvy Vera - The Land of the Lightning’s People

To close the 2024–2025 season of Brazilian Screenings, we are honored to welcome our guest curator, Naara Fontinele. Originally from Rondo nia, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, Naara will present a film highlighting Brazil’s Indigenous nations. An independent scholar in film and media studies as well as a film educator and curator, Naara holds a Ph.D. in Cinema from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (France) and is temporarily based in the Bay Area. Alongside testimonies and reenactments, Ava Yvy Vera follows, between documentation and mise en scène, the daily life in Guaiviry, as cultivated by the Guarani and Kaiowa envision in their bem viver (living well). 

Directed by a collective of Guarani-Kaiowa filmmakers, Ava Yvy Vera relates the re-occupation of the land by its Ava Guarani inhabitants, in the region of Mato Grosso do Sul near the Paraguayan border, where agribusiness oligarchs perpetuate a genocide that dates back to the colonial period. The film retells the murder of their leader, Nisio Gomes, by forty masked gunmen in 2011. The careful work in the act of filming and capturing time allows Ava Yvy Vera to unravel, from the history of violence and trauma experienced by the Guarani and Kaiowa, a fiction of the reclaimed land that incorporates cinema into the very heart of its resistance. 52 minutes, Rated G (All ages admitted).

“This is the heart of the Earth. We’re fighting for the heart of the Earth, this territory. We’re not only fighting for this place; we’re fighting for all territories belonging to the heart of the Earth. That’s where we belong. We, the Ava, are the descendants of the heart of the Earth.” The land is a source of knowledge, resistance, and wonder. For the Guarani and Kaiowa in Mato Grosso do Sul, reclaiming their traditional lands — their tekohas — means reclaiming the possibility of living according to their teko, their way of being. This film, created by a group of young people and leaders from the Guaiviry tekoha, tells the story of the struggle that led to the reclaiming of the territory where they now live.

Brazilian screenings will resume in September.