For the People, By the People

“For the People, By the People” explores the role of audiovisual media production in the construction of history, community, and sovereignty.  Set during the pivotal summer of 2007—roughly one year after the Asamblea Constituyente began meeting to revise Bolivia’s constitution—the film considers the work of the CEFREC/CAIB filmmaking collective and their long-term project of decolonization, cultivating a more pluralistic society amidst the complex dynamics of globalization and the accelerating pervasiveness of digital technologies.  Circulating primarily outside of corporate-owned film and television industries, their work—ranging from journalistic reportage to fictions, allegories, and cosmograms—folds the aesthetic and the political into one another, opening up new possibilities for reconfiguring ecologies of media production as practices that can function as exercises in translation, tools for resistance, and homegrown vehicles for collective transformation.