The Americas 
funded by Hamburger Filmbüro
broadcast by Planet-France
Essay film, 90 minutes; Ecuador, Guatemala, USA



The colonization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is related in this essayistic report. The spokesman for the Maya priests, Nicolas Oxlajuj, comments on the sequences by telling his own personal story. The film begins with the menstruation ceremony held for a young Apache girl in the USA, continues via the dance of the Spanish conquest, and goes on to visit the villages of resistance in the Guatemalan jungle and in the Ecuadorian rain forest.

It tells of uranium contamination and oil companies, of missionaries and their converts, of shamans and medicine men, and of the traces left behind by the massacres of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The film also tells the story of a culture and an identity that will not cease to exist.