Under the Canopy
An investigation of how local communities in the Andean–Amazon Piedmont of Colombia are reclaiming ecological stewardship, technology, and cinema through collective authorship. Rather than portraying the Amazon as a remote wilderness or site of extraction, the project sought to reveal it as a lived, governed, and relational territory shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems and everyday practices of care. Created through a participatory process, the film placed phones, drones, and trail cameras directly in the hands of community members, transforming digital tools into instruments of storytelling, biodiversity mapping, and territorial monitoring. The project explored how Traditional Ecological Knowledge and contemporary technologies can coexist as complementary ways of knowing and caring for the forest. We set out to question authorship, representation, and decolonial practice: who has the authority to tell stories about the Amazon, and from what position? By extending collaboration into editing with Indigenous co-authorship, the film aimed to challenge extractive models of filmmaking and foreground Indigenous futurity, ecological governance, and relationships between human and non-human worlds.