A film by Felipe Castelblanco and Lydia Zimmermann, with Ñambi Rimai Media Collective

In Kamënstá language, the word Ayênan means “the smallest particle in the universe that jumpstarts life.”

This film documents a counter-expedition that follows the upward movement of water throughout its natural cycle, going from the Andean-Amazon foothills to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Colombia. Along the way, this journey reveals the traces of a long-forgotten expedition in search of El Dorado. Still, this time, a group of indigenous and non-indigenous filmmakers come to request permission from the territory and harmonize with it.

Climbing up from a river in the lower Amazon to a lake in the upper Andes, Nambi Rimai Media Collective members come to a sacred landscape to plant water back into the mountain and return a long-lost treasure. Together they create an offering, a ritual, which embodies situated forms of biocultural peace-building between regions, cultures, and non-human worlds. Ultimately, the film explores how representational techniques like film can dialogue with a landscape beyond the realm of visibility. Doing so opens an aesthetic path to explore the connection between indigenous ways of seeing, territorial thinking, mutual acknowledging, and much-needed acts of reciprocity.