THE HUMMINGBIRD PAINTS FRAGRANT SONGS, by Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi, is a documentary making its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows Sara Flores, an indigenous Peruvian artist who burst onto the contemporary art scene late in life. The film follows Sara, including when she starts to speak up about climate change and how it’s affecting the Peruvian forest. We spoke with Balada and Norzi ahead of the film’s premiere about following Sara’s life and career, making films in the Amazon, and working with the Shipibo people and community.
Science & Film: I can't get out of my head the first scene of the film where Sara is chopping the bark off of the tree, and there's a sort of violence to that act, in contrast to some of the deforestation the film touches on that is occurring throughout the Amazon. How did you want to weave in the climate change message of the film?
Èlia Gasull Balada: I think it's important to consider at least from our point of view that we were rendering an intimate portrait of an artist for this film, but Sara and other indigenous artists are finally landing in the cultural capitals of the West and in the contemporary art world, and it's a recognition that is long overdue, but it's coming at a really paradoxical moment because their own territories and lifestyles that allow their own ancestral practices to continue are on the brink of disappearing. I think within the film and its arc we tried to articulate this tension through the trajectory of Sara and bring that urgency on the screen in a way that was the most cinematic possible, the most linked to her own commitments and implications politically. She has had a third act in life, but she's also having a third act as an activist. She's involved in supporting the resistance in her own community. So that has been our approach, to do it through her story, and not through an expositional take, trying to explain to people over and over again things that they already know. We've tried to see if we can have an impact through a more experiential view, and always through Sara's own life experience.
Matteo Norzi: I mean, if I can add anything, I think is this, contrasting between what we expect an indigenous woman is and what ends up revealing herself to be in the film. So we think about the opposite of fragility, vulnerability, and resilience. And you know the reality is that indigenous women they do everything in the Amazon. So I think we wanted to introduce Sara with a machete to show that she's not somebody who cannot find her way around and through this very dense environment.
The Shipibo people are a matriarchy. In every single village, all the women are related, and the men marry in, and that has an impact on culture because since it's kind of like a microecology, wherever you go in the Amazon is slightly different. So there are different plants, and so the women who stay there, generation after generation, are the holders of these knowledges. I think it's very important to understand that being indigenous is an expression of the environment in which everything you do, you are, you want to become. All the rituals are part of that relationship with the landscape that forges who you are. And in the case of Sara, that reaches also to her artwork.
Courtesy the Shipibo Conibo Center
S&F: You follow her in pretty personal moments. Can you talk a little bit about how you formed your relationship with her? How you decided that you wanted to follow her in particular?
MN: The film follows her, but we've been involved with the Shipibo and with Sara in particular long before the film started. I saw her work for the first time during the making of another film in the Peruvian Amazon, and for a long time, all I knew was this incredible vibrational power that the work had, and the three letters of initials that she used to sign SFV: Sara Flores Valera. Then, I fell into a rabbit hole, and I wanted to discover who she was. Until one day, I knocked at her door. And what was a treasure beyond the work was her smile and her welcoming me in. I'm very tall man. She's a very tiny woman. The film is, let's say, just the latest of many adventures that we did together, within the work that the Shipibo Conibo Center, which is the production entity on the film, carries also beyond filmmaking as a platform for cultural production that does books, exhibitions. We have a legal program and many other facets.
EGB: I can add a little bit to that just to explain that the film happened through conviviality, and there is a very deep friendship among us that goes far beyond the film. There is a life commitment that goes far beyond the film. I don't think it's possible to render this level of intimacy if you don't have a relationship with the artist that you're making the film with and her family. It happened because we really like each other. We knew each other before even making the film. Matteo has been involved with the community since the past 15 years. I started being involved in 2019. We've made endless trips to the Amazon. We both have lived there in different periods of time. I did live there for almost a year during the making of this movie, becoming part of this matriarchy and establishing a real friendship. It's not following the interest of the film; we want to be friends and have this bond to understand each other, regardless of what we do and what the outcome of this is. That allowed us to film certain situations or collaborate with Sara and her family to find ways to explain their story that was comfortable for both of us, and that could also bring on screen the nature of who she is, how she lives, and also how she relates to her family, and what does it mean to live in the Amazon right now?
S&F: It's a very striking contrast when she goes to Dior for the first time from home. You do a great job of showing her perspective in that room where she's sort of small and there's so much going on.
MN: We try not to shy away from those contrasts; the film is actually made of those. We do some juxtapositions, and we play with sound and with images one against the other, and we hope that the audience can draw their own conclusions. There are so many other questions related to the confrontation between Sara as a little David against Goliath–these big corporations and institutions and buildings and so on. So we like try to play with scale in that sense.
Courtesy the Shipibo Conibo Center
S&F: Did you have a sense of how sort political things would get?
MN: I would say so. We wanted for this film to be an activist film, a militant film, and somehow the political thread emerges from the second half onwards as Sara is having what we call a political awakening, and she realizes in order to let's say find her own healing, she needs to put herself at the service of something larger than her. It is personal for me, I think also for Èlia, the way that we approach this collaboration with the Shipibo is to put ourselves at service. They lead us in the night of the ayahuasca ceremony with their knowledge, and we lead them in front of the camera. But this is very much a horizontal collaboration in which nobody is above anybody else.
EGB: What we didn't know at all when we started this in 2023 was that Sara would became famous during the making of the film. We didn't know that she would go viral in Peru after the Dior collaboration. We didn't know that she would represent the Venice Biennale as the first indigenous Peruvian artist to be in the Peruvian Pavilion in 2026, and that she would have overwhelming press. None of that was, you know, expected. Probably the Venice Biennale was on the horizon, but we did not expect her explosion to be as big as it's been. So here we are putting out the film at a very timeless moment for her career and her exposure worldwide.
MN: Èlia was the editor on that film [ICAROS: A VISION] I made in the Amazon 15 years ago. I think you know Aziz Isham? Aziz was producer of my first film. He actually introduced me to Èlia because we were looking for a Spanish-speaking talented editor, and back then she took the job, and then we ended up basically becoming, let's say, better filmmakers together. This is our second big collaboration.
S&F: Can you talk a little bit about how the two of you work together?
EGB: I did become involved with the Shipibo community through an edit room, seeing material in a film and listening to ICAROS and editing a movie about a place and a community that I had never met or never been there, and then after the making of ICAROS, which was premiered in 2016.
Matteo went on to start the Shibipo Conibo Center, and I did follow the trajectory of the organization for the past 10 years, from the very first small show that he did in New York at the Drawing Center. I started seeing the work of Sara in New York even before meeting her. I started meeting political leaders that would come for the UN Forum every year at a gathering that they do in the organization, and then finally in 2019, I was able to go to Pucallpa where Sara lives, and I started a project there as a visual artist with a group of indigenous women that were forcefully sterilized during the Fujimori dictatorship.
I lived there. I met Sara, and then you know we were always in touch because I was starting to do some community organizing work in the community that Matteo was working with, and through his organization and through a legal program that's funded through part of the funds that come selling Sara's work. When Sara started to blow up, let's say, or to hint that she would finally explode in the summer of 2023, Matteo told me, "Look, Sara has a show in Paris. Dior has reached out. There's two shows of hers in September in New York." We both knew right away that there was a film to be made. And because we had been involved with the community before, we were able to pull it off right away. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to pull this film off in three years.
S&F: Can you talk a little bit about the connection between ICAROS and this film?
MN: When we were about to premiere ICAROS in Tribeca, we applied for visas for our indigenous cast for them to attend the premiere, and all the visas got rejected. That was a wake up call because we realized that even filmmaking is a form of extractivism. You go there, you take somebody's stories and images, you bring them back, but the relationship is not equal. So together with Abou Farman, we funded the Shipibo Conibo Center as an organization that would actively work to reverse these patterns of neo-colonial extraction. The political awakening for us was 12 years in the making in between one film and this one.
S&F: How are you thinking about this film's distribution and making it accessible to the indigenous people?
EGB: We just applied applied for a grant to have an impact campaign. Sara is coming to Toronto with her husband, her two daughters, and her two granddaughters. So six of them are coming to the premiere, and then we are strategizing on our whole festival run, making sure that the people that are at the forefront of the struggle, like the indigenous guards, will be able to join us and speak for themselves, and the people that are doing the political work, that they will be able to travel. So there's been a lot of work done through the Shipibo Conibo Center about visas and legal work. It's an ongoing effort, which you only realize how hard it is when you have to do it, and you see all the barriers that you have to go through to get a visa for a Peruvian citizen. It's an insane amount of work and costs, but we are committed to keep doing it and fundraising for it, so we can present the film with the right partners, and hey can take over the stage and speak about what they're going through.
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