Juan's recent film, KIRANIA (Long Flutes) was produced out of his fieldwork at the Northwestern Amazon. The film is among six films selected by the academic committee of the SALSA conference. The film will be screened at the Welt Museum in Vienna at the end of June.Abstract follows:
~KİRAÑİA (Long Flutes)
36:45 min, Pamie (aka. Cubeo) and Spanish
with Englishsubtitles. Juan Castrillón. United States, 2019.
The film dramatizes how a pair of long flutes sounds like, how an indigenous group of the Northwestern Amazon makes it, and how community members make sense of it. Rather than a film made for documentation purposes, it was developed as a multimodal strategy for diffracting Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa analytics about instrumental performance, remembrance, and aurality.
The film includes Tukanoan speech genres and language ideologies within its cinematic strategy as a way of challenging the standard explanatory perspective of ethnomusicological films about musical instruments. The experimental character of the film, then, attempts to present Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa audible worlds to indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives alike. ~KİRAÑİA (Long Flutes) is connected to other three ethnographic artifacts of a doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology; especially within a multimodal chapter in which video and audio recording devices were called to render ethnographic interactions with the Tukanoan archive of expressive culture in Uaupés, Southern Colombia.