This verite-style film invites viewers into the intimate conversations between Maria and her grandchild, Marucha: two Indigenous refugees living in displacement. To Maria, the Venezuelan delta is her home. To Marucha, these refugee camps are all she knows. Through the rhythms of their daily lives, we witness the complexity of raising a new generation in displacement and explore how land, memory and identity are deeply intertwined.
This project aims to help visualize the invisible losses of Indigenous displacement, through the narratives of two generations’ voices weaving together. Their conversations demonstrate how memories are processed and passed down across generations while far away from the land that holds the fingerprint of their unique culture and identity.
Join us in supporting Indigenous Warao refugees, who are featured in this film, as they harness the power of storytelling in order to pass down memories of home, culture, and language, to a new generation growing up in displacement.
Indigenous displacement has global cultural ramifications. Despite comprising less than 5% of the earth’s population, Indigenous communities account for the majority of the world’s cultural diversity. It’s time to center the Indigenous experience and promote their visibility.
In the face of this unprecedented mass migration, there is an urgent need to resource and support displaced Indigenous communities’ efforts to hold onto their unique cultural identities, languages, and traditions.
By supporting their efforts, we can guard against vast portions of the globe’s cultural diversity disappearing.
2024 Southwest Premiere at Aspen Shortsfest
Screening Schedule TBA
Past Screenings and Events:
2024 World Premiere at the Big Sky Documentary Festival, Missoula Montana
We believe that how a story is made is just as important as the story itself. This includes working to align our process with key values:
Bruna is an activist, public speaker and writer from Brazil who focuses on forced displacement and climate change. Bruna designed and co-founded Circles of Hospitality, an organization that develops social, cultural and educational initiatives for refugees, asylum seekers and vulnerable immigrants in Florianópolis, Brazil.
José Albarrán is a Venezuelan human rights activist based in Brazil. He works on the front lines of care for immigrants and refugees by offering humanitarian interpretation and intercultural mediation with Venezuelan Indigenous people of the Warao ethnic group.
We would love to come to your school, production company, or community to talk about collaborative reporting and community co-creations within the filmmaking and storytelling industry. Our goal is to challenge current industry power dynamics and create new models for community-led storytelling. Please fill out the form below if you are interested in having us speak to your group or consult on a project.
Existimos En La Memoria is part of a larger, ongoing collaboration with the communities from the Warao tribe living in displacement in Brazil to use the power of storytelling to platform voices of Indigenous displacement.
The Home Collective was invited into this story through Bruna Kadletz in April 2021. To create this short film, our team was a blend of unique skills and lived experience from Brazil, Venezuela, and the U.S.
