Expedition in preparation
An elderly woman sets the point down on the cloth. No model, no pencil, no guideline. She does not lift her hand. The line sets off, turns, folds back on itself and closes exactly where it had to.
Beside her, her sixteen-year-old granddaughter tries to follow. Her line shakes.
That shot lasts thirty seconds. It contains everything we are going to look for.
What is at stake
Kené is written down nowhere. No manual, no archive, no file. It passes from one hand to another hand — or it does not pass. The same is true of the clay, the plants, the songs, the language: an entire memory held in a small number of living gestures. And a gesture cannot be stored. It is made again, or it is erased.
This is a disappearance without noise. Nobody films it, because there is nothing to film: no fire, no collapse, no date. Only, one year after another, one hand fewer that knows, and one hand more that did not have time to learn. We are coming to film the exact moment when the line still passes.
Ucayali basin, Peruvian Amazon
Shipibo-Konibo — around 33,000 people
10 days, 6 of them filming
November or May — to be confirmed
4 people, equipment brought from France
The people, before us
Before leaving, look. This report by Peruvian public television is devoted to kené, the art of lines and forms — the very art we are going to film being passed on.
Costumbres (TV Perú) — Kené, saber de lÃneas y formas. A report by Peruvian public television on kené, the art of lines and forms. 48 min, in Spanish. Watch on YouTube
Off camera
While the maestra draws, something else is advancing. Not an opponent: a front. Five forces, all real, all documented, all moving along the same river.
The land being sold
A few hours from Pucallpa, a Shipibo-Konibo community has been fighting for ten years against the advance of oil palm plantations onto its customary territory: thousands of hectares cleared, a land title claimed and never granted, defenders threatened and attacked. When the forest retreats, it is not only trees that go. It is the chacra, the dye-bearing bark, the clay of the riverbank — the very material of the gestures we are filming.
The airstrips in the forest
An investigation published in December 2024 counted 45 clandestine airstrips in the department of Ucayali alone, several of them inside legal forestry concessions, serving the drug trade. A single province, TahuanÃa, holds 57% of the region’s coca — 1,909 hectares. This is not scenery for a script: it is what decides, very concretely, where we can go and film and where we do not go.
The dredges and the mercury
Illegal gold mining has reached the rivers of Ucayali. On the rÃo AguaytÃa, operations in 2025 and 2026 uncovered dredges, mercury and organised networks. Mercury does not stay in the water: it rises into the fish, and fish is the daily meal. This is where the pressure stops being an abstraction — it arrives on the plate.
Infobae Perú · Latina Noticias · La República, 2025-2026
The city
Pucallpa is a few hours away by canoe. There is a wage, a secondary school, a signal, a phone. Every family works out the same equation, and works it out quietly: stay or leave. That is exactly the question we will put to two teenagers, on camera, without suggesting the answer.
The screen
The pattern, for its part, travels very well. Kené is recognised as cultural heritage of the Peruvian nation — which has not prevented it from being photographed, vectorised, printed onto fabric and sold in fashion collections without the women who draw it. The design is digitised in a second. The knowledge that produces it is not.
Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, 2008 · Peruvian press, 2024
The paradox holds in one sentence: the pattern has never been so visible, and the knowledge never so fragile.
Five bodies of knowledge, filmed end to end
Each skill is filmed whole, from the first gesture to the last, with a woman who transmits and a young woman who learns, both identified in advance. Not an illustration: the complete chain.
Kené — the drawing
The freehand line on cloth, without model or guide. Embroidery, painting, the application of the pattern. Macro on the needle, hands laid over hands, the glances that check. A recognised maestra, a young apprentice.
Ceramics — the earth
Clay taken from the riverbank at dawn. Coil building. Polishing with a stone. Then, at the end of the day, the open-air firing: fire, smoke, earth changing colour. The most spectacular sequence in the film — and the most dangerous, because a piece can shatter.
Plants and dyes
The walk to the chacra and the forest edge. Gathering the bark. The dye bath heating. The cloth taking on colour. Drying in the wind. Domestic and dye-related plant knowledge: the ritual field is not the subject of this reconnaissance.
Language and song
The bilingual school: Shipibo on the blackboard, the exercise books, the yard. The songs that accompany gesture and work. And in the evening, the children walking home — a long shot, no commentary.
Water and forest — fishing, hunting
The oldest knowledge, and the one nothing protects. Reading the river. Knowing where the fish holds at low water and where it passes in flood. Setting a net, reading a track on the bank. A knowledge that can only be taught by doing it, at dawn, in silence.
It is also the point where the pressures become physical: a dredged river, a fish loaded with mercury, a forest in retreat. To film the fishing is to film the exact place where the world economy touches a family’s plate. To be confirmed with the community.
The river decides
Nobody sets the schedule of this shoot: the Ucayali sets it. Between flood and low water, eleven metres of range at Pucallpa — the height of a three-storey building, rising and falling every year.
November to April, peaking between February and April. You can travel everywhere, and you film in the rain.
May to October, lowest from July to September. The banks appear, the clay is reachable, the fish concentrate — and some channels become impassable.
November or May. Two different films depending on the month. The choice will be made with the community, on its own calendar.
Our working rules
They are not a moral supplement. They are what makes the images possible.
- Nothing is filmed before the assembly says yes. The first days are spent without a camera.
- Every release form is translated and read aloud in Shipibo, by someone trusted.
- Nobody works for free in front of the camera. Time given is time paid.
- The materials for the workshops we film are supplied by us: cloth, thread, clay, dyes.
- What is made in front of us stays with the women who made it. We do not leave with the piece.
- The patterns belong to the women who draw them — and the film will say so, on screen.
- We show the images before we leave. A copy of the film and a set of photographs stay with the community.
- What is not filmed is not filmed. The ritual field is not part of this reconnaissance.
What we will bring back
Eight interviews. Four — perhaps five — chains of transmission filmed in full. A series of portraits to camera. A stock of atmospheres: the rain, the insects, the canoe engine, the work songs. Views of the river from the air, if they are permitted.
And above all: all of it enters EWA indexed, timecode by timecode. A gesture becomes searchable. A sentence in Shipibo becomes findable. It is no longer a stock of rushes — it is a memory that can be questioned, including by the community itself.
Where we stand. Expedition in preparation: no date is fixed, no image has been shot. Window considered in November or May. Host community and the assembly’s agreement under discussion with a local coordinator. Fifth body of knowledge — fishing and hunting — proposed, to be confirmed on site.
The film will not say that a world is going out. It will show a woman drawing, a young girl starting again — and it will leave the viewer to count the hands.
Sources for the facts cited. Oil palm and land defenders: Forest Peoples Programme, Front Line Defenders. Clandestine airstrips and coca: Mongabay, December 2024. Gold mining and mercury in Ucayali: Infobae Perú, Latina Noticias, La República, 2025-2026. Population and language of the Shipibo-Konibo: Base de datos de pueblos indÃgenas, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú. Kené, cultural heritage of the nation and appropriation: Ministerio de Cultura, Peruvian press. River regime and shooting plan: “Peuple Racine” reconnaissance brief, August 2026.