The Archipelago of Gesture: Some Insights on Images

Reflections on South-South Dialogues and the Brasília Film Festival

These small and clumsy drifts are nourished—like a plant—by the light of the films shown during the 60th edition of the Brasília Film Festival.

As I write, I can’t help but surrender to my body—the same body that sits through films, that sometimes falls asleep, sometimes cries, and sometimes forgets. With this inevitable body, I touch life. And the immense light of the screen wraps the collective of bodies who sit together to imagine.

Since each body takes up space, it’s also inevitable to think about the territories from which we program, watch, reflect on, and write about cinema. I write about Latin American cinema from Latin America. And every time I do, something harsh always surfaces: The colonial project not only reorganized systems of knowledge but also restructured visuality—how we see, what we represent, and how images circulate.

Cinema has often served as an institutional and ideological apparatus, a vehicle for recycling and masking enduring structures of power. But cinema is also something else. It can be a situated method—a science-theory-path that allows us to generate sensitive knowledge, rooted in place and experience, to engage with the world we inhabit. Cinema is a map of gestures, a repository of questions.

While listening to filmmakers speak about their work in Brasília, many of those questions returned to me—questions that had passed through my eyes and continued to echo in the many bodies my own has learned to be, thanks to cinema.

At a festival, films do not stand alone. A program of films resembles an archipelago: distinct islands sharing a geographic and conceptual unity. They form a meaningful horizon of connection—a relational geography. When I watch a film, I imagine the invisible threads linking that moment with others: the shared space, the act of collective watching, the strange intimacy of a room full of strangers focusing on the same light.

Cinema exists in relational time-space; it only exists because someone is watching—and is also, in turn, watched by it. Within that shared time-space, connections matter. The films in a program form the islands of a single body. Glissant once wrote: “The archipelago is a thought of relation.” Something singular happens during festivals: films, those mobile points of light traveling from place to place, suddenly become suspended within the geography of the archipelago. In that moment, in that temporary arrangement, a territory is formed. Criticism, then, becomes a way of mapping that territory—a charting of the light that brushes against our bodies.

This territory only exists because films are never alone. Relationships emerge between them, between people, between gazes. And this time, the archipelago was a Brazilian film festival. I try to imagine the questions that shaped its programming. And since each body is a relationship, I recall the things filmmakers said before their screenings: how long it took to make a film, the communities that supported it, the intimate gestures present in every camera movement.

Films are never alone, because—like any body of light—they are orbited by many things. Cinema has taught me that films are accompanied by communities, by bodies that watch, breathe, and cry.

Thinking about these light-communities leads me to a crucial question: Who watches Latin American cinema from within Latin America? Who still goes to the cinema? And how is all of this connected to the urgent need to regulate streaming platforms?

Films are born from questions, but they must also navigate funding structures that often pull them away from their place of origin. Many Latin American films are first shown in Europe or North America, following routes that prioritize external visibility over local relevance. So what are the communities that orbit the birth of our images?

I think of something Pedro Adrián Zuluaga once said: “Audiences must be narrated, not counted.” I remember watching films at the festival alongside groups of children brought in as part of an educational initiative. The cinema became a space-time where childhood encountered light. The children laughed, spoke to the screen, commented out loud, and occasionally drifted to sleep. There was no central gaze, just a multitude of peripheries sharing the same light.

A friend, Juana, once told me about how one of her short films was selected by a festival in Africa. She felt joy imagining it being seen there. In that moment, a new space-time appeared: the archipelago stretched across the Americas and Africa. It reminded me of Glissant again—the emergence of a route not from center to periphery or vice versa, but from periphery to periphery. A circular nomadism in which each periphery becomes its own center, dissolving the binary altogether.

How might regional festivals—those that call upon us as Latin Americans—help trace these circular, south-to-south routes? How might they challenge the programmed technologies of film distribution and give rise to a kind of pirate utopia based on relationship, imagination, and shared struggle?

In times of war and displacement, what kind of world can films offer? What happens when we move the idea of the center sideways—as a way to return the gaze to those who have long been watching us?

To paraphrase José Carlos Mariátegui: we must bring collective forms of life into being not through imported models, but through our own territories and our own languages. He spoke about socialism in Latin America, but I think the sentiment applies to cinema as well. The communal is not new here; it is a return to older ways of organizing life and territory.

So, what can cinema bring into being? Can it offer ways of seeing that are also ways of being—shared, rooted, situated? I imagine an archipelago of gestures: a constellation of films that dismantle the very notion of the center (which only exists in relation to a periphery). A film program as a poetics of relation. A network of future-facing gestures that speaks from the South, to the South.

To see, think, and write ourselves from and with our cinema is to return the gaze—an act of cultivating the common. Cinema, then, becomes a channel of communication, an assembly of light where time, space, bodies, and contexts speak.

And so I imagine—guided by the archipelago of gestures left behind in Brasília—that each island-image, in relation to others, might give rise to future collectives. That the act of gathering to fabulate what is yet to come might begin again.

Valentina Giraldo Sánchez|
Edited by Robert Horton
©FIPRESCI 2025