The Heritales Film Festival was born in 2016 with the intention of sharing stories from around the word about culture and heritage. Two of Heritales founders, Nicola Schiavotiello and Maria Zozaya-Montes, spoke to Incomindios this week to discuss the importance of shared cultural history and how film and art can be used to engage people.
Prior to Heritales’ conception, the founders discussed the way in which they could bring the importance of heritage to light, first considering hosting conferences in academic settings. However, Nicola tells me they quickly realised that these settings were evidently inaccessible for the majority of people: “When you have a conference in a university, you don’t have people coming from outside university. Even if the conference is free and open to everybody, they will not come. I think you have to speak their language”. Film was chosen as the media form for its universality, “it's something that everybody can understand very rapidly because they relate to the characters in the film. It’s not just watching - you create a link between the characters, the people telling the story and the people watching”. As Heritales has grown, the type of media presented has also varied to further engage people with heritage. Attendees of Heritales can expect to see and experience theatre, art, table games and video games.
This is central to the concept of Heritales, taking a people-centred approach to heritage. Nicola and Maria note that within Eurocentric conceptions of history, heritage is often associated with inanimate objects in museums, buildings and historical sites, but “we wanted to basically have this perception of heritage as people and communities.” Nicola explains further, “you can go in a museum and look at something and maybe a small description of that piece, but it doesn’t really tell you what the object is and the life of that object. It is a bit without soul. When you have a story, you have an object, and you have the people telling that story. I think it’s a complete story of heritage.” Taking this people-centred approach to heritage, following the screening of their films, an interview with the director takes place at the festival. This allows for a greater connection to be made between the story, the storyteller and its viewers, as well as a deeper understanding of other groups' culture, traditions and history.
Another priority of Heritales project, is to fight against dominant recounts of the past which have been told by the “winners” of history. Nicola and Maria explain how the history that is told in educational settings so often obscures the narratives and experiences of the colonised world. The Heritales film festival provides an opportunity to present “artistic ways of showing what the so-called civilised world did to defend eurocentrism”. Further elaborating on this point, Maria explains, “The only way to recover that history of our common heritage is by giving visibility, through documentaries, games, installations of art. Here documentaries are a cultural weapon. A weapon to fight colonisation and to recover that history that has been denied to many communities”
The importance of this has only been highlighted in recent news reports concerning the discovery of mass unmarked graves of Indigenous children in Canada who had been forced to attend residential schools. One of these schools, the Mohawk Institute Residential School, dubbed the Mush Hole for the poor quality of food served to its residents, has become the inspiration for a film due to be screened at Heritales film festival in collaboration with Incomindios UK. The attendees of such residential schools were subject to physical abuse, sexual violence and a process designed to divorce them from their own culture, traditions and language. Whilst the Canadian government continues to grapple with the cruelty that occurred within these schools, there is value in using Heritales’ platform to address the reality experienced first-hand by the Indigenous children who survived it.
Films screened by Heritales will be available to watch online very soon, keep an eye on their website for more information!
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