Shoot planned — 13 to 28 February 2027
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 granddaughter tries to follow. Her line shakes.
This scene contains everything we are going to look for.
The expedition is set
Since September 2026, the scouting trip has become a shoot: a place, a filming window, a team.
The film will be shot in the native community of San Francisco, the largest community of the Shipibo-Konibo people, on Lake Yarinacocha near Pucallpa. The confirmed window runs from 13 to 28 February 2027: fifteen days on site, including seven shooting days, with a small team of four. The seven precise shooting days will be agreed with the community.
The community president, Richard Ochavano, signed an agreement in principle and an invitation for the team on 24 September 2026. The formal act of the community assembly, required before any image is recorded, still has to be obtained before the shoot. Local production is handled by Piedra Azul Films in Pucallpa. The community itself has named the fifth body of knowledge: paiche fishing.
A meeting of gazes
The film embraces the meeting of gazes rather than erasing it. First, the community’s: Shipiba filmmaker Mirena Maldonado, whose participation as associate filmmaker was confirmed in writing on 24 September 2026, will contribute from a perspective rooted in her culture. The director’s, in voice-over. Science’s, as a counter-shot: an interview is under way with a French specialist of indigenous peoples. And youth’s: Camilo, seventeen, French-Argentinian, the director’s son — a film about transmission, shot between a father and his son among grandmothers and their granddaughters.
An inquiry already begun
The questions this expedition will ask — how a society repairs rather than punishes, who decides and what place women hold in collective decisions, how exchange works when money is not at the centre, and what it means to be in good health — extend documentary work carried out since 2023 with the nonprofit Le Média Solidaire: on justice and reintegration (Concienta — after prison, peer support) and on other paradigms of money (“When money kills, change currency”, local exchange systems). And previous fieldwork with an indigenous people: “Mapuche Patagonia”.
The first film: “The Singing Line”
This expedition will deliver a documentary short of around 15 minutes, “The Singing Line”, bound for festivals and then published here — along with full-length interview capsules, one per body of knowledge, so that the recording serves to teach, not only to show. Our value chain shows where every euro goes →
The film: “The Singing Line”
A line that sings, a line that transmits
In the Peruvian Amazon, San Francisco is the largest community of the Shipibo-Konibo people. Women there still hold the knowledge of kené — lines that the outside world often sees as patterns, while they are also a language and a means of transmission.
The film follows one of them, a kené maestra, through a full day, from first light on the river until evening. Clay gathered from the bank, bark boiled for dye, the point tracing without a model, a lullaby sung to a granddaughter who tries and begins again: these gestures form the film’s breathing spaces. They accompany the making of a work, from raw material to the finished piece.
Between the gestures, four questions structure the exchanges with the community. When someone causes harm, do you punish or seek to repair? Who decides, and what place do women hold in collective decisions? How do people exchange when money is not at the centre? What does it mean to be in good health: to silence a symptom, or to hold body, mind and relationships together? The director asks simply; the film will also keep the answers that contradict him.
Gradually, kené appears not as a simple ornament, but as a bond between generations. Drawing, dyeing, firing and singing are moments when an identity is transmitted and renewed. The film follows this double movement: through the making of a work, to understand what holds a society together; and to ask what a modern world may still learn from indigenous peoples, without nostalgia or idealisation.
“The Singing Line” is a self-contained documentary short of around 15 minutes. It forms part of the wider EWA — Human Legacy project. Intended first for festivals, it will then be published free of charge on the platform, accompanied by longer interviews devoted to the knowledge documented.
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
15 days on site, 7 of them filming
13 → 28 February 2027 — confirmed window; the seven shooting days will be agreed with the community
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 PerĂş) — KenĂ©, saber de lĂneas y formas. A report by Peruvian public television on kenĂ©, 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, TahuanĂa, 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 rĂo AguaytĂa, 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.
Four questions about what holds a society together
Put to the community without presuming the answers, they form the film’s spoken thread, alongside the five bodies of knowledge filmed through gestures.
Justice — punish or repair?
When someone causes harm, should the response punish, or seek to repair by first understanding what produced the harm?
Decision-making — who chooses?
How are collective choices made in the village, and what place do women hold in the decisions that concern everyone?
Exchange — when money is not at the centre
How do goods and services circulate: through reciprocity, barter, shared obligations or other forms of exchange?
Health — body, mind and relationships
What does it mean to be in good health: to silence a symptom, or to care for body, mind and relationships together?
Five bodies of knowledge documented during the expedition
The documentary short will centre on the transmission of kené. The shoot will also document ceramics, plant dyes, language and song, and paiche fishing as designated by the community. These materials will feed both the film and longer interview capsules for the EWA platform.
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.
The river — paiche fishing
Reading the water, recognising where the fish pass, setting a net and passing on the rules of sharing: ecological knowledge learned through practice, just like drawing or dyeing.
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.
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.
February 2027, at high water: you can travel everywhere, and you film in the rain. The 13–28 February window was set with the community, on its own calendar; the precise seven shooting days will be agreed together.
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 — 25 September 2026. The shoot is planned from 13 to 28 February 2027; no image has been shot yet. The community president confirmed in writing, on 24 September 2026, that the team is expected and the conditions of the shoot. The formal act of the community assembly, a mandatory prerequisite, will be obtained before the first image. Mirena Maldonado’s participation as associate filmmaker is confirmed in writing. Paiche fishing is the fifth body of knowledge designated by the community. The Montpellier Métropole ICC Fund application was submitted on 25 September 2026; the Anako Foundation application is ready but has not yet been submitted. None of this funding has been secured to date.
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 PerĂş, Latina Noticias, La RepĂşblica, 2025-2026. Population and language of the Shipibo-Konibo: Base de datos de pueblos indĂgenas, Ministerio de Cultura del PerĂş. KenĂ©, cultural heritage of the nation and appropriation: Ministerio de Cultura, Peruvian press. River regime and shooting plan: “Peuple Racine” reconnaissance brief, August 2026.