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In the Balance these festivals participate in global networks that link Indigenous media training, production and exhibition across Abya Yala, a Kuna name for the Americas used increasingly in the circuits described here to evoke an Indigenous sense of place. Festivals, I argue, reconfigure Indigenous film praxis from a marginal practice to a vibrant transnational and transcultural cinema. In the process, they provoke a productive reckoning, updating and reimagining of what counts as Indigenous cinema, contributing sophisticated renderings to questions that haunt indigeneity across diverse public spheres worldwide.

Research on Indigenous media in Latin America has largely taken the form of case-by-case ethnographies focused on regional media projects, notably in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Bolivia (see Turner 2002; Salazar 2004; Schiwy 2009; Zamorano Villarreal 2017). Approaching media making as a site of political discourse and a means of social action, these studies illuminate ways in which contemporary Indigenous practices are rooted in a conjunction of community values, contexts and methodologies, which media anthropologist Faye Ginsburg (1994) has called ‘embedded aesthetics’: qualities that denote the mode of production and determine the process as well as the product. Circulation practices have also been addressed within the context of regional studies. Jeff Himpele (2008) investigates the modernization of Bolivia through the lens of cinematic media, showing how the country’s contemporary Indigenous video movement has forged new publics and political discourses. In turn, Erica Cusi Wortham (2013) describes how …