"The Ashaninka Indians who live in the Amazon Basin of eastern Peru have a long history of resistance to outside forces," Diane Kitchen notes. Attracted by this strength and tenacity Kitchen spent seven months with the Ashaninka filming Before We Knew Nothing, an exploration of the lives and values of a people who continue to resist acculturation into the standards of the modern world. "My aim," she says, "was to enter the Ashaninka culture and use the camera in such a way that the Indian personality, the side usually kept hidden to the outside, begins to become visible. The film is also about my journey, my probe into their remote society. It is a quest into memory, human inheritance, loss and transition of culture, and the fragile threads that bind society." Professor Ackbar Abbas in his commentary on the film notes, "On the one hand (Kitchen's) images have a speculative fugitive feel to them...on the other hand her images are scrupulously matter-of-fact, devoid of 'poeticisms.'...The filmic images become the means by which a non-reductive and non-ethnocentric understanding of others may be constructed."