Across the Hummingbird Bridge

'Across the Hummingbird Bridge' was born from a place of deep anxiety regarding our everyday futures under the face of climate change. The title refers to the ‘hummingbird bridge’ described by anthropologist and paqo (healer) Americo Yabar as the bridge from the materialistic mode of Western thought to the metaphysical immediacy of the Andean tradition.

Thus, I came to these people, nestled in straw-built mountaintop huts, sparse villages and city slums, with a naive and romanticized expectation that their animism could heal the anxiety built from the failings of Western science and politics to provide hope in the face of unfathomable change. The paqos of the Andean tradition, however, are a practical, immediate people whose spiritual and agrarian lifestyle has gone largely unchanged since Incan times. They exist by the mean fruits of their own labor and wisdom, subsisting on donations from visiting tourists and government tithes, and are thus one of the most vulnerable cultures on the planet. The film reveals a plea from these people to be seen, heard, and believed in, to trust in the power of intention and in the ultimate resiliency of nature. I sought out to make a film consisting of worldly advice from people tied to the Earth on how to heal our collective relationship with her; the paqos gave me instead their own epitaph, a testimony to the power and fallibility of belief in and of itself.