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~KIRAÑIA (Long Flutes) (2019)

~KIRAÑIA~KIRAÑIA (Long Flutes)

Juan Castrillón, University of Pennsylvania, 2019

~KIRAÑIA (Long Flutes) dramatizes how a pair of long flutes sounds like, how a Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa indigenous community of Northwestern Amazon makes it, and how community members make sense of it. The film came out of my ethnographic fieldwork in Uaupes in Southern Colombia in which I used video and audio recording devices to render the relations my interlocutors and myself have with the Tukanoan archive of expressive culture. ~KİRAÑİA rather than a film made for documentation purposes, appears as a multimodal strategy to exchange and transform gestures, senses, and affects. 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 audiences alike.
  • Director/Author: Juan Castrillon.
  • Producer: Juan Castrillon, 2019.
  • People: Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa, Vaupés, Southern Colombia.
  • Language: Pamie (aka. Cubeo, Tukano Oriental) and Spanish, with subtitles in English.
  • Length: 36:45.


This film was screened at the XII SALSA Sesquiannual Conference in Vienna (2019).

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