Steeped in the long oral tradition of Waorani storytelling, Gange Yeti shares her own coming-of-age story as a young woman living deep within the Amazon rainforest. Following Gange and her community for over 11 years, the film captures her transition from a quiet teenager into a confident mother at a critical turning point for her culture and rainforest. As the granddaughter of one of the last Waorani elders that lived in complete isolation before outside contact, Gange is determined to capture her grandmother’s unique experience while she still can -- balancing school, motherhood, and tradition along the way.

Directors' Statement

MIWENE is a labor of love and the result of a 12 year collaboration with the indigenous Waorani community of Kewediono in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We have strived to spread creative control and ownership to multiple storytellers in the process, as is more aligned with the Waorani’s custom of storytelling and collaboration. Thus, MIWENE effectively has four primary directors. Anita Yeti and Obe Nenquimo are indigenous Waorani women from the community of Kewediono, and Jennifer Berglund and I (Keith Heyward) are filmmakers from the US who met in Ecuador in 2005 and volunteered as teachers in Kewediono in 2011. Many of the Waorani filmmakers currently live in remote communities without access to the internet, so we are honored to present this film on their behalf and the rest of our team.

From its inception, this collaboration was grounded in the acknowledgement that the telling of indigenous experiences have always been dominated by outside perspectives with more privilege and resources. Thus, it was critical for us to acknowledge the inherent imbalance of power that the non-Waorani collaborators brought to the project, and thus seek every opportunity to give creative control and financial ownership of the film to the subjects of the film and the community members whose stories were being represented. At our first community meeting in 2011, the whole community made it clear to us that they would not be passive characters in this story, as they had been in past films made about their culture, but instead they wanted to participate as the storytellers themselves. The leadership of Gange Yeti and Obe Nenquimo in particular were invaluable in crafting a more authentic story at all stages of the filmmaking process, despite the technical challenges of living in such an isolated community.

For the past 12 years, Jennifer and I have built close relationships with many families of Kewediono, developing trust, understanding, and collaboration that was crucial for telling this story. We have watched some of our closest friends in the community grapple with suicide, illness, and the loss of loved ones from snake bites and lack of medical access. As these experiences and relationships developed, the story developed along with it becoming a more personal exploration of culture, identity, and agency. Driving that story is the perspective that culture and identity are never static and inherently always modern in their manifestations. They are not things to be preserved, but lived.