Summary

Land of Friends focuses on seemingly small images and micro moments of everyday life to highlight the tensions and struggles between local fishing and farming communities and the multinational corporations converting the Yuma into hydroelectric power. In the film, Caycedo intersects footage recorded along the river with scenes of her tracing the flow of the river with a brush on paper and, towards the end, with images turned upside down. The choice of everyday gestures and these interventions acknowledge the small scale informal economies along the river and the relationship people develop with bodies of water and their spiritual significance. Through the practice of appropriating for example satellite images and the insistence on developing alternative forms of representation, the film proposes the unlearning of our reductive and commodified perception of rivers.