By Carol Kalafatic (Quechua/Spanish/Croatian), Latin American Program Assistant, FVC

Cinematography Education and Production Center (CEFREC)
Calle Otero de la Vega 812 2do Piso, zona San Pedro - La Paz BOLIVIA
Phone/Fax: (5912) 2490094 (Orlando Antezana, Edgar Suxo)
Phone: (5912) 2492398 (Abel Ticona)
Cefrec@gmail.com; ambaibo@yahoo.com
www.videoindigena.bolnet.bo (In Spanish and English)

The Cinematography Education and Production Center (CEFREC) was founded in 1989 in La Paz, Bolivia. Its primary mission is to facilitate technical training in film and video for the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and to assist in producing and distributing their work. The broader vision that guides CEFREC is empowerment through increasingly sophisticated knowledge of film and video making.

CEFREC steps into the gap left by Bolivia's social institutions in meeting the communications needs of communities, specifically for community organizing and educational and cultural projects. Indigenous peoples who have worked with CEFREC in Bolivia have noted that, in the current era of trade liberalization and globalization, the dominant society has used mass media to flood indigenous communities with commercial and cultural messages that are incompatible with their lives. CEFREC and the media makers seek to counteract the messages of mass media, which tend to devalue indigenous culture, and find ways to harness media as a powerful tool for self-determination.

CEFREC has formulated a broadly based media initiative called the National Indigenous Plan for Audiovisual Communication, Development and Empowerment, Development and Empowerment, which Faustino Peņa, president of the Bolivian Indigenous Peoples Audiovisual Council, calls "a 'dream come true.' . . . We see ourselves in the screen and we are able to express our ways of life and our culture through the video."

National Networking

The National Plan (which is completely independent of national government) was established in 1996 with the goal of strengthening and giving value to Bolivia's indigenous cultures, identities, and collective visibility. It is co-coordinated by CEFREC and the Bolivian Indigenous Peoples' Audiovisual Council (CAIB), along with Bolivia's three primary indigenous organizations: the Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia Confederation (CIDOB), Bolivian Rural Workers Sole Syndicate (CSUTCB), and the Bolivian Settlers Syndicate Confederation (CSCB).

Bolivia has a population of about eight million people, approximately seventy percent of which is indigenous, with thirty-six distinct peoples (or tribes), yet these peoples are the most vulnerable and marginalized sector of society. The National Plan aims to strengthen Native self-representation by appropriating technology to create indigenous peoples' own images. Through regular follow-up and evaluation processes, the plan measures its impact and promotes the idea of teamwork, ensuring the active participation of indigenous organizations throughout the process.

Using the long tradition of community radio as a basis for its work, the National Plan began with the establishment of a National Network of Communication and Audio-Visual Exchange in more than 100 indigenous communities throughout the country. The network serves as an autonomous educational mechanism for intercultural development of Native peoples. The National Plan has produced nearly seventy works in its five years of existence, including the first series of "indigenous fictions" produced in Latin America. More than a dozen of these works were featured in the NMAI Native American Film and Video Festival 2000.

Responding to the Grass Roots

Through the use of a process similar to a "needs assessment" at the grassroots level, CEFREC productions respond to specific community needs. Therefore, the works range from pieces that expose the pollution of lands and rivers to productions in which communities recapture their own cultural expressions (for example, traditional healing and food making practices, dances, music, and art making). Though the works serve specific needs, they aim to create an overall process of constant discovery in which viewers (and producers) can pose questions and enter into dialogue with themselves and others about issues that emerge from the experience of making and viewing media.

The works produced through CEFREC and its initiatives include documentaries, fictions and docu-fictions, and "video letters" from communities that want to share their customs and lifeways with other communities. A recent project involved the use of digital video to create a series of fictions and docu-fictions.

According to many indigenous media makers in Bolivia, fiction has emerged as an effective means of re-creating and re-valuing indigenous oral history, cultural identity, and heritage, especially for the benefit of young people and future generations.

CEFREC has been working toward a production program that will include a range of works in various genres and formats, adapted for two types of distribution and use:

1) Within indigenous communities, through the National Network of indigenous media makers

2) Through television broadcast to increase the visibility of indigenous peoples within the broader society

Festivals and Declarations

CEFREC is also the home of CLACPI (the Latin American Council of Indigenous Peoples' Film and Communication), which was created in 1985 in Mexico City to organize the Indigenous Peoples Film and Video Festivals. The festivals include screening events, the awarding of scholarships and other awards, and working groups in which participants often produce collective statements and declarations on issues of importance to them. The last of the six Festivals took place in 1999 in Xela, Guatemala. Consultations are currently underway to decide the exact location of the next Festival, which will take place in Chile in 2002.

Cochabamba Declaration

The participants in the International Forum, developed within the framework of the Fifth American Indigenous Peoples and First Nations Film and Video Festival, in the City of Cochabamba June 27th through June 29th, 1996, address the Nation States, multi-lateral organisms and organisms of cooperation in order to express the following:

• The economic processes of development that are imposed on our countries are accompanied by a collection of constitutional and state law reforms which is affecting the ways of life of our Original Peoples in terrible and impunable ways.
  
  
• That the projects implemented in our villages, besides mitigating in unsatisfactory ways the effects of structural adjustment policies, in many cases are geared to pacify, divide and debilitate us, with the purpose of guaranteeing the transfer of currency and profitable goods from our States.
  
  
• We think that it is not sovereign to apply policies that oblige governments to deliver natural resources to large national and transnational companies, especially when they prove to be accomplices to aggression against our peoples as the front line to the destruction of the environment, the life and the culture of our peoples.
  
  
• Within this framework, we demand the recognition of indigenous autonomy and territoriality in the exercise of the right to define our processes of integral and harmonious development, for which the following is fundamental:

  1. Respect for indigenous peoples' traditional forms of political organization

  2. Recognition of indigenous rights as the permanent means toward the restitution of social harmony within our peoples.

  3. Respect for our own ways of designing proposals for self sustainability which respond to our realities.

  4. That any economic or development activity aimed at our peoples must have the participation and consent of our communal assemblies, who must be informed of the socio-environmental and cultural impacts caused by said activities.

  5. That the States assume their responsibility to direct policies and sufficient resources so that original peoples will be the ones to determine the development of the intercultural bilingual education system, the health system, indigenous communications and the constitutional recognition of indigenous languages.

  6. The new development processes of our countries involve the deepening of participation of our peoples in instances of public power, for which it is necessary to urge laws which allow direct representation of our peoples.

  7. We demand that communications media permit the direct participation of indigenous communities in order to contribute to the recognition of and respect for plurality as a substantial element toward the achievement of harmonious coexistence in our societies.

  8. Finally, the participants in this Forum achieved within the framework of the Fifth American Indigenous Peoples and First Nations Film and Video Festival, established as the Network of Indigenous Communicators of America, commit ourselves to contribute to the processes of self-determination of our peoples.

The delegates of Bolivia and of all the countries and Indigenous Peoples present.

Cochabamba, Bolivia, June 29th, 1996.

Open Letter, Cochabamba, 29th of June, 1996

Over time, Indigenous Peoples and First Nations have suffered the theft of our "personal and communal spirits" through the use of photographs and audiovisual cameras (film-video) which transport our images to another space.

Our lives, our histories, our personages, our landscapes, our rivers, our mountains, which are in turn part of our legacy, have served as a source from which individuals gain wealth and prestige.

Indigenous Peoples and First Nations demand of the diverse countries of the world, represented in their governments, institutions and organizations, the RETURN of our images, the return of the representation of our spirits reflected in films and videos.

We consider that filmmakers and producers will hear this complaint from those who once opened the doors and that, through the respect and dignity characteristic of human beings, will heed the voice of the ancestors.

Especially those non-indigenous filmmakers and videomakers committed to the indigenous cause, will be the first to carry out this demand.

For the preservation of our cultures
To keep our spirits in their essence

WE DEMAND THE RETURN OF OUR IMAGES!

PARTICIPANTS IN THE INDIGENOUS FORUM OF THE "FIFTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND FIRST NATIONS FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL"

Image Credits: All images courtesy of The Cinematography Education and Production Center (CEFREC): Still from Qamasan Warmi/Women of Courage; CEFREC production crew; Production shot, Oro Maldito/Cursed Gold; Production shot, Qati Qati/Whispers of Death; Still from Qati Qati/Whispers of Death; Members of CAIB (Bolivian Indigenous Peoples' Audiovisual Council) during the production of Tinkuy/A Glance; Production shot, El Diablo Nunca Duerme/The Devil Never Sleeps; Ayllu Aransaya community members during the production of Desempolvando Nuestra Historia/Dusting Off our History