A look at the films in this edition, which traverse the Americas like a rhizome: a network of roots without a center or single origin. In them, territory is not property, but a relationship: inhabited land, polluted but defended water, cultivated forest alongside memory. The point of view shifts: the narrators are Indigenous peoples and communities marginalized by the official History, who now occupy the center of the image, the listening, and time. Their less usual narratives mix facts and dream, archive and orality, denunciation and celebration, rejecting both the exoticism of the outsider's gaze and the nostalgia for a frozen purity. Tradition appears as a living practice, which transforms itself to remain, in tension with the devastation imposed by the predatory practices of capitalism—the advance of mining and agribusiness, the poisoning of rivers, the commodification of everything that has life and breath. Given the logic that converts territory into a resource, these narratives follow a different grammar, not always visible in the written History. If the unity of the continent was born from colonization, it continues to be remade through different forms of struggle—from land reclamations to the reclamation of image. In these films, cinema is a tool for (self-)determination. We invite the audience to watch not as observers of others, but as those who recognize themselves as part of the same narrative. Because the rhizome has no outside, we are all entangled in it.
