Indigenous films made by indigenous people

Snip from a Wired News article by Jason Silverman:

On weekends, Mariano Estrada Aguilar packs up his video equipment and heads to one of the many outlying villages in Chiapas. Come nightfall, he'll find the biggest blank wall in town, power up his portable projector -- wiring it to the battery of a car if there's no electricity -- and show a few of the 27 videos he's made in his village of San Manuel.

Estrada is one of an emerging breed of DIY indigenous filmmakers attempting to galvanize their increasingly fractured societies through digital video. From La Paz, Bolivia to Oaxaca, Mexico to Nunavut on the Canadian Arctic Circle, video is becoming an essential organizing tool.

"We don't think of our videos as entertainment up on the screen," Estrada said during opening remarks at the Native American Film and Video Festival, which took place over the weekend at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, or NMAI, in lower Manhattan. "We hope to inspire reflection and ponder the situations that our communities are up against."

According to filmmakers at the festival, those situations include displacement from their ancestral lands, environmental degradation, loss of language and a flood of mainstream entertainment that's overwhelming their own cultural traditions.

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