Supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, winner of the IFF Panama’s Primera Mirada pix-in-post showcase and selected for Cannes Film Market last year before world premiering at January’s Rotterdam Film Festival, Ana Elena Tejera’s “Panquiaco” opened this year’s IFF Panama festival on Wednesday.

That marks further recognition for a hybrid documentary-fiction film which talks about belonging and plumbs community life in an indigenous village in Panama’s Guna Yala region, poetically tracking the journey of 67-year old Cebaldo, who lives in Portugal but returns to his village in Panama which he left as a young man.

The film also explores the link between his character and indigenous tribesman Panquiaco, who showed Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa a way from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean.

Produced by Tejera, Maria Isabel Burnes (Too Much Productions) and Tomas Cortés-Rosselot (Cine Animal), “Panquiaco” will also open Frames of Representation at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).

Tejera is pursuing an artistic residency at Le Fresnoy in France. In April she returned to Panama for the IFF Panama Festival and has remained there due to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic also stymied an on-site edition of IFF Panama, which has been transformed into a five-day online festival, running May 22-26, including film screenings and round tables. Interviewed by Variety, Tejera talked about her inspirations for the film and her current project, a short film featuring her grandmother.
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