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While a number of films have been made about Panama’s Indigenous communities, few are by native filmmakers themselves. To date, perhaps only three Indigenous Panamanian filmmakers have ventured into filmmaking. Duiren Wagua, whose documentary feature debut “Bila Burba” plays at this year’s 12th Panama International Film Festival (Iff Panama), running April 4-7, is hoping to change the status quo.

Wagua and the company he co-founded with his brother Orgun, Wagua Films, have provided production and consulting services to companies seeking to film in Panama’s Indigenous territories. Orgun Wagua is also an editor and has worked on the projects of Ivan Jaripio, who hails from the Emberá community of Piriati.

The Wagua brothers also provided production services to the second Indigenous-themed docu at the fest, “God Is a Woman” by Swiss-Panamanian Andres Peyrot, where they also feature among the talking heads. In it, Duiren notes that in the past,...

Andres Peyrot on his faith that the original film would be found: 'I was crazy enough to believe deep down that moment would come just because the movie would be left so incomplete without it' On a basic level Andres Peyrot’s God Is A Woman is a documentary about the hunt for an older film, with the same title, undertaken by the Kuna community in Panama. That film, shot by Oscar-winning documentarian Pierre-Dominique Gaissea in 1975, was lost and never seen by its participants after the filmmaker ran out of funds and had his reels seized by the bank. However, as Peyrot follows author and campaigner Arysteides Turpana on his hunt for the film, which Turpana himself took part in, the newer documentary opens out into a dialogue between past and present, a scrutiny of the subjectivity of documentary and a philosophical exploration of the importance of cultural artefacts and the concept of home.