Alex Geldzahler, Contributing Photographer

On Wednesday, members of the Yale community viewed Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman’s recent film “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims.” 

The Whitney Humanities Center screened the last installment in Ferreira da Silva and Nueman’s creative series on the natural elements, which focuses on the collective history and nature of Chile’s Atacama Desert. After the screening, the filmmakers talked about their creative choices and journey in creating the video essay. 

“[The film is about whether] the elements dissolve the privilege given to humans [and if], like everything else, we are made of the elements,” said Ferreira da Silva, a philosopher, artist, author and professor. 

The film, which has a runtime of 50 minutes, is a departure from typical documentary filmmaking, said Neuman, an artist and writer based in Berlin. The team made several unique artistic choices to develop “something which is equally planetary and can take us to places around the world” and serves as a “critique of capitalism.”

Much of the film consists of desert landscapes in Chile and areas disrupted by human activity, particularly the expansive presence of the mining industries. In doing so, the filmmakers aimed to contrast human activity in the region and the natural environment, which is slowly being harmed by the demand for metals, such as copper and lithium, used to manufacture electronics. 

The film narrows the idea of human sovereignty over the natural world and investigates the “moral failures contributing to climate change,” according to Ferreira da Silva and Neuman. 

“Once the human privilege is dissolved, then we acknowledge that everything that exists is important,” Ferreira da Silva said. Neuman added, “It is harder to destroy and exhaust something if you can recognize that you are a part of it.”

The film also explores these ideas from a fictional perspective, departing further from the team’s earlier, more documentary-based projects. Various characters provide vignettes in the film, including Ariel, a mine worker exposing the injustices of the industry, Constanza, a marine biologist studying the fog of the desert, and Omar, a traveler.

In doing so, the film emphasizes that the metals mined from the desert are unethically sourced, meaning “each camera is haunted,” the film said. 

Santiago Acosta, a professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures who led the Q&A following the screening and planned the event, was drawn to the film because it “helps to question those boundaries of nation and geography,” and is part of the work to “dismantle categories like sovereignty and ethnocentrism.”

By transcending beyond “Western philosophy,” the film considers the Atacama as a place of “material solidarity,” which bears witness to human failures such as the murders under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the transatlantic slave trade. 

Film subtitles supplement the viewer’s understanding by adding descriptive imagery and essential information. 

Symbols at the top right of the screen allude to which of the four natural elements — fire, earth, water and air — are being focused on in each scene. The elements are central to the overall creative intentions of Ferreira da Silva and Neuman. “Ancestral Clouds and Ancestral Claims” is the final installment in a series of four films relating to the elements. The others, which have been produced throughout a decade, are titled “Corpus Infinitum,” “4 Waters” and “Serpent Rain.” 

Sebastián Andrés Grandas GRD ’30, was drawn to the unique approach of the documentary and found the film’s “post-humanist aesthetic” interesting. 

The Whitney Humanities Center is located in the Humanities Quadrangle at 320 York St.