hugo serejo genes

Projecting Nancy Flowers

Director & Editor
35 min Documentary,  (English, Portuguese)
Project Conceived by Mauricio Cortes, Laura Genes

In the process of archiving the life’s work of a 96-year-old visual anthropologist, her photos are brought back to her subjects in the Xavante village of Pimentel Barbosa, in Mato Grosso Brazil. Coincidentally, the Xavante are also developing their first audiovisual archive.

“I think my greatest frustration came from my sense of my inability to help the Xavante as much as they helped me by instructing me about their way of life. Women brought me their sick children, and often I had neither the medicine nor the knowledge to cure them. Fathers brought me their sons and asked me to teach them Portuguese and arithmetic so they could deal better with their changing world; I tried, but I could not devote much time to the task if I was to do my own work...When I left to return home, Apowe’s eldest son made a final speech for my tape recorder, urging me to write about the Xavante, ‘So that your people will know’. That, at least, I have tried to do.”

– Nancy May Flowers