This film travels into core of Easter Island beyond the postcard image that we know. Through the eyes of Marisol, a prominent local leader, we meet the colonial history of the indigenous native people, the Rapa Nui, descendants of those that constructed the mysterious stone monoliths.

 

Despite countless episodes of foreign “exploration” that began in 1722, when the island was “discovered” by a Dutch Captain, this community has maintained a millenary knowledge alive. Consequently, ancestral principals fuel the Rapa Nui resistance from a foreign administration and Marisol has to follow the orders given by her deceased grandmother’s spirit. She asks her to occupy the luxurious German hotel built on top of her tribe’s land. From being housewife that becomes an international spokeswoman, to living in a shag she constructs recycling airlines materials, Marisol gains her land back and liberates the “Navel of the Earth”.

 

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Camera Antonio Quercia, Ivan Marinovich, Isabel Burr Raty

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Historical Consultant Marcos Moncada

 

Sponsorship Indigenous People’s Issues & Resources, Human Rights Institute Chile, Rapa Nui Clans Territorial Assembly, Observatorio Ciudadano Chile, National Association of Native and Rural women Chie, Chilean Polinesia

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Watch A Common Breath, Part II: Territories Talk with Elizabeth Povinelli and Isabel Burr Raty at la Loge, Brussels (BE)

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