March 2005
Juan José García Ortiz
(Zapotec) is the president of Ojo de Agua Comunicación,
a media organization that produces video with indigenous communities
in southern Mexico. He was director of the Centro de Video Indígena
in Oaxaca from 1998 to 2002. In 2004 García was named president
of the Consejo Latinoamericano Audiovisual de Cine y Comunicación
de los Pueblos Indígenas (CLACPI) at the 7th Festival Americano
de Cine y Video de Pueblos Indígenas. As the president
of CLACPI, he will assume primary responsibility for coordinating
the 8th Festival Internacional de Cine y Video de Pueblos Indígenas,
which will be held in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006. García received
a 2003 National Video Resources' Media Arts Fellowship. He started
out as a radio broadcaster for XEGLO-The Voice of the Sierra,
a station that broadcasts to Zapotec and Mixe mountain villages
in Oaxaca. He also has worked with Comunalidad A.C, a Zapotec
media organization producing radio, video, and regional music.
García grew up in Guelatao de Juárez, Oaxaca.
"Each work that I direct represents a challenge for me;
I seek to offer a source of information and at the same time an
aesthetic proposition, something pleasant and entertaining that
provokes reflection and debate about the importance of revaluing
our own knowledge within the indigenous communities: our histories,
our relationship to nature, our language, our communal life."
Screened by NMAI
Image credit:
Juan José García - Photograph by Amalia Cordova,
NMAI
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