Spotlight

Creator in the Spotlight.

Bárbara Kariri

Earths Inner Voice.

Bárbara Kariri

Writer, Filmmaker, Performer, Researcher

“We're creating Indigenous cinema made by Indigenous women for Indigenous women.”

Bárbara Kariri is a writer, filmmaker, performer, and researcher whose creative work emerges from the land that raised her, the Kariri territory in Ceará, northeastern Brazil. Born in the Marreco community of Quitaiús, Lavras da Mangabeira, she brings a multidimensional artistic practice rooted in Indigenous worldviews and the poetics of place.

Bárbara observes, noting how even literary works like José de Alencar's Iracema have historically exoticized Indigenous experiences. "Now, within the Rede Katahirine" - the network she coordinates - "this is changing. We're creating Indigenous cinema made by Indigenous women for Indigenous women."

“Cinema has always looked at Indigenous peoples from the outside in,”

As a screenwriter and director, Bárbara works across genres: documentary, fiction, hybrid - with a fierce commitment to storytelling that honours Indigenous lives and futures. Her works such as Mãe Cajarana, Uru'cu, Desterro, and Aceso Fogo have been featured in festivals including ECHOES Indigenous Film Festival and Amotara - Olhares das Mulheres Indígenas no Cinema. She was selected for major industry development labs such as LANANI (with Globo/FLUP) and the Cena 15 script lab at Porto Iracema das Artes, where she developed Dentro do Rio, an animated Indigenous fiction feature.

Whether through film, poetry, or dramaturgy, Bárbara's voice resonates with a profound sense of ancestry, memory, and transformation. Her debut poetry collection, Poesia da Terra, draws on elemental and cosmic relationships with the land. For her, the earth is not merely setting, it is origin, matrix, and living presence. Her poems move through beauty and brutality, weaving language that is at once tender and insurgent, grounded in Indigenous cosmology and the lived experience of women who carry and reimagine their worlds.

This shift from external gaze to internal voice represents a fundamental transformation in how Indigenous stories are told. Through her coordination of Rede Katahirine and her own creative practice, Bárbara is part of a movement reclaiming narrative sovereignty - ensuring that Indigenous peoples are no longer subjects to be studied or romanticized, but authors of their own cinematic and literary expressions.

Bárbara is also a passionate educator and cultural advocate. She has worked as a mentor and tutor at Brotar Cinema com o Povo Anacé, and contributes to initiatives aimed at amplifying Black and Indigenous voices in Brazilian cinema. Her academic work, currently as a PhD candidate in Performing Arts at UFMG, complements her creative production, further rooting her practice in dialogue between theory, performance, and decolonial imagination.

In every medium she touches, Bárbara Kariri creates spaces for Indigenous presence to expand, not in response to imposed narratives, but from the sovereignty of her own voice. Whether through a whispered poem or a vivid onscreen image, her work invites us to see, feel, and learn from a different way of being in the world.

With a growing body of films and publications, Bárbara is a vital Indigenous voice in contemporary Brazilian cinema and literature, crafting stories not just to be seen or read, but to be felt with the whole body, like a song rising from the earth.

Spotlight

Creator in the Spotlight.

Bárbara Kariri

Earths Inner Voice.

Bárbara Kariri

“We're creating Indigenous cinema made by Indigenous women for Indigenous women.”

“Cinema has always looked at Indigenous peoples from the outside in,”

Reclaiming the Frame in Indigenous Cinema

A Voice Shaping Mexican Cinema

Reclaiming Story, Memory, and Territory through Film

Indigenous Media Collective