On March 9th Kayapó videographers Krakrax Kayapó, Pati Kayapó, and Bepto Kayapó, along with singer/song writer Pykatire Kayapó and village leader Kaket Bepuneiti will be on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus to screen their productions, perform songs, and discuss the current struggles for rain forest preservation and cultural survival in the Brazilian Amazon. Also accompanying them will be Rafael Galvão from Association for Protected Forests, a non-governmental organization dedicated to the protection and conservation of Kayapó Territories and defense of Indigenous Rights.
In the 1990s Kayapó videographers from the Brazilian Amazon began producing short films to document their society’s struggles for land, rainforest preservation, and cultural survival. At the vanguard of what is today called Indigenous Media, these films were screened throughout South America, Europe, and the USA and ended up playing an important role in the securing of Indigenous lands and livelihoods. In the 2010s a new generation of Kayapó videographers has emerged that continues this tradition while also seeking to capture novel cultural innovations transpiring as the Kayapó engage the outside world. Whether it is concert by a Kayapó pop/country singer or an intertribal demonstration in a faraway city to protest the construction of a hydroelectric dam, the videographers are there to film. These latter films embody cultural hybridity, or cultural invention that refracts and recombines elements from multiple cultures.