- This event has passed.
2022 North Carolina Latin American Film Festival: Secrets from Putumayo
October 19, 2022 at 7:00 PM
Dir. by Aurélio Micheles. Brazil. 2020. 83 min. In English, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles.
The story of the father of indigenous human rights inquiries, Roger Casement (1864-1916). His work in Africa, Brazil, and his native Ireland still has repercussions today.
In 1910, the British Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, Roger Casement, undertook an investigation into allegations of crimes against indigenous communities committed by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company. Narrated from his journals, Secrets from Putumayorecounts the horrific treatment he uncovered there: an industrial-extractive system based on killings and slave labor in the midst of the Amazon rainforest, “a real green hell.” Shocked by his discoveries, and despite a heavy personal toll, Casement was determined to bring awareness to the British of their own colonial atrocities by revealing the appalling human cost of the rubber industry.
Comments by Robin Kirk, Co-Director of the Duke Human Rights Center at FHI following the screening.
Shown with short film “Altiplano.”
Dir. Malena Szlam. Canada/Chile/Argentina. 2018. 15 min.
Introduced by Jessica Doyle.
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.