Screening of God is a Woman and Indexed Beings and discussion with Cebaldo de Leon, Olowaili Green, Helen Knowles and Manuel Mueses.
This double screening brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers in a discussion on the role of film, documentary and animation to explore issues of cultural representation, the relationship between ethnographic filmmaking and the communities being documented and the multiple journeys of memory.
📅Monday 8 th June 2026
🕐2pm
📍Room TLC033 – Durham University (Teaching and Learning Centre, South Rd, Durham – DH1 3LS )
Free entry — booking recommended
This event is organised by SIGICS and Cinemaattic, with support from the Flourish Fund (Durham), as part of Latin Connections. Gunadule filmmaker Olowaili Green is visiting Scotland as a co-researcher on the RSE-funded project Disputed Histories and Heritages, led by Charlotte Gleghorn at the University of Edinburgh, while developing her new film Suggunya, which tells the history of the Darién Scheme from the perspective of the Guna Dule people, narrated as an audiovisual mola. This event will also take place in Edinburgh. Click here for more information.
About the films:
God is a Woman Directed by Andrés Peyrot and produced by Duiren Wagua, the film is documentary which follows the journey of Guna Indigenous people as they recover a long-lost film made about them in the 1970s. What begins as a quest to retrieve missing footage unfolds into a powerful meditation on cultural memory, representation, and the right of Indigenous peoples to reclaim their own image.
In 1975, French Oscar-winning filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau travelled to Panama to document the Guna. Decades later, the film had become a legend — spoken of but never seen. When director Andrés Peyrot uncovers the forgotten reels and returns them to the community, God Is a Woman becomes not only a documentary, but a moving reunion between a people and their own recorded history.
This screening will also feature two short films by Olowaili Green Santacruz: Mugan boe (The Cry of the Grandmothers) and the music video Canción sin miedo (Fearless Song).
Indexed Beings is an artist film made by Helen Knowles in collaboration with Jorge Contreras, Manuel Mueses and Soraida Chindoy, Inga leaders from Colombia. Using participatory approaches, it reenacts a dispute between a botanist and a Taita (shaman) over the study and treatment of plants, showing differences and potential encounters across cosmologies.
Manuel Mueses. Frame of Indexed Beings by Helen Knowles
Programme:
14:00 – 14:10: Welcome and introduction
14:10 – 14:20: Mugan boe (4 min) & Canción sin miedo (4 min)
14:20 – 15:50: God is a Woman (86 min)
15:50 – 16:20: Discussion with Cebaldo de Leon and Olowaili Green.
16:20 – 16:35: Coffee break
16:35 – 17:20: Indexed Beings (42 min)
17:20 – 17:50: Discussion with Helen Knowles and Manuel Mueses