Denise Zmekhol, photographer and filmmaker, is one among the many filmmakers who are arriving in Kathmandu to attend NIIFF 2011, starting Friday. Films and documentaries based on the theme of indigenous women empowerment will be screened at the event. [break]
Zmekol’s documentary relates a touching story that is both heart-rending and visually captivating. “It’s a coming of age story. I visited the Amazon forests 15 years after I had photographed two kids there,” she begins.
The forests had disappeared and they were living aa different life. “A highway was built through the forest so the tribal people had to change their lifestyle. It’s a tale of encroachment and the loss of a culture.”
What caused her to track the kids is interesting. She came across the stored reel of the children years after having visited the Amazon forests in Northern Brazil and photographed them. She developed them and the eagerness to know what had happened to them led her to fly back to Brazil from America where she was then working.
She also had to fulfill a promise to renowned Brazilian environmentalist, Chico Mendes. She had been acquainted with him and his work while working in the Amazon forests.
Her photographs of the activist was also published in Time magazine and other publications.
One day she received a call from him asking her to film his funeral because he knew his life was in danger. A shocked Zmekol was quick to console him and tell him that this wasn’t going to happen. By the end of 1988, he was killed.
She couldn’t muster the energy to film his funeral but years later Zmekol did pay him a tribute in her own way.
She unraveled the stories of the people he loved so much and discussed the environmental causes he fought for all his life through her documentary.
“Their freedom, their language and their livelihood practices had gone through a drastic transformation. White people had encroached on their land, brought with them diseases. Their bare bodies now had to be clothed and education was a priority.”
Her documentary says it all. She has been screening her work in various film festivals around the world in the last three years and the response has been overwhelming.
“People often come to me after watching the film and ask me what they can do? I tell them, a big initiative is not required. We can work with the little things in our lives and let nature work in its own course.”
As a woman filmmaker, Zmekol understands that the documentary wouldn’t be the same if it was made by a male filmmaker, “Although Children of the Amazon is a personal journey, the documentary has a feminine quality. It’s more poetic and lyrical.
It’s not that I have not been touched by the documentaries of male filmmakers but whatever women do, they do it differently.”
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