Tonight’s program features three short works made over the last twenty years that expand the nonfiction form, drawing variously on activist video, experimental film, and performance. While grounded in ethnography, they move beyond recording another culture to involve their subjects in the shaping of the story and making of the work, while also bringing attention to the aesthetics and process of filmmaking. Video in the Villages Presents Itself documents a twenty-five-year history of developing a model for indigenous-made media in Brazil that includes workshops, research, reenactments, and advocacy. The Black Cave moves between a Taino creation myth and two boys’ play as it creatively explores the layered history of Puerto Rico’s Paso del Indio. La libertad finds its structure in the pre-Hispanic backstrap loom, weaving a portrait of one Mexican family’s relationship to art, craft, and freedom.