FRAMES OF REPRESENTATION 2020: Panquiaco - when home becomes but a dream
The ICA’s FRAMES of REPRESENTATION 2020 is taking place online, via their new digital programme platform Cinema 3, from 27 November – 13 December.
Featuring UK premieres of 18 films from across the globe, Frames of Representation is a showcase for the ‘cinema of the real’ - offering aesthetic and political resistances to cinematic categorisations.
The entire programme is FREE to the ICA’s Red, Green and Blue members or £6 per screening for non-members, plus a series of Q&A and Talks will be freely available for all.
Filmed in collaboration with indigenous communities in Guna Yala, Panama, Panquiaco is a poetic fable of melancholy and belonging. Ana Elena Tereja succeeded in creating a genre-blending film, sitting between a universal allegory for family and the very personal reclamation of an indigenous identity fragmented by global displacement.
We follow Cebaldo, a middle-aged fishermen’s assistant in a northern Portuguese town. The town’s lively buzz becomes a distant side note as Cebaldo drifts along, always seeming to be elsewhere. Images of a childhood spent in Guna Yala, Panama, many years in the past, intersect his present. Sonic memories become conscious acts of preservation. He lonesomely listens to nostalgic jukebox songs and a cassette of voice messages left by his family, reminding him of death anniversaries and asking for his return. The replaying of the past fills the room in a ritualistic manner, making clear that all these years he never fully left. His spirit wanders between two realities that reveal themselves increasingly irreconcilable. Cebaldo sets out on a journey home to Panama, and more so, to return to his past.
Tereja’s vision is defined by succinctly layered dialogue and a strong cinematic language. The camera becomes the vessel connecting the physical realm with the spiritual reality of Cebaldo and his ancestors.
The film merges Cebaldo’s personal journey with pre-colonial myths and ancestral tales, questioning the choices we make unknowingly. A creation myth by the indigenous Kogi community that depicts the sea as an expansive mother of life and emphasises the interconnected nature of all elements, opens the film. The name-giving tale of Panquiaco interweaves the narrative. Panquiaco guided Spanish colonialist Vasco Núñez de Balboa to the Pacific Ocean and inadvertently betrayed his land and people. In his grief, he became a soul wandering between two seas. Cebaldo’s loss of memories is a clear allegory to Panquiaco’s fate and the dispossession of indigenous communities and the invalidation of their knowledge by the west.
Having chosen a different path, Cebaldo’s roots began to disappear. He returns to an empty home where the knowledge he came to seek no longer resides. His personal journey is defined by re-encounters with collective rituals and the celebration of an indigenous uprising by his community. These communal experiences make clear how essential nurture and respect are in order for your roots to grow.
In Guna Yala, forgetting is treated as an illness, remedied with botanic baths. Guided by indigenous leaders and healers, Cebaldo comes to face the reality of the path he once chose. A bath with healing plants may soothe his ailments, yet a return to the past of the land once imprinted on his skin no longer remains possible.
Without sacrificing its intricacies for legibility, Panquiaco makes a personal journey universally accessible. This is a film about the troubles of recovering the forgotten when home becomes but a dream. It’s a gentle paced piece that engulfs through sensitive writing and self-sufficient visual poetry. Although at times the myths, tales and observational footage run more in parallel than as one interwoven story, it’s impossible not to empathise with Cebaldo and reflect on your own sense of belonging whilst watching. With this, Panquiaco stands aptly as the opening tale for Frames of Representation 2020.
