New Animism and Shamanic Cinema

Overview & Synopsis

This chapter discusses several films: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sat pralaat! (Tropical Malady for its international distribution, 2004), Francisco Huichaqueo’s Gente pájaro. Che Uñum (2007), James Marsh’s Project Nim (2011), and Gerard Ortín Castellví’s Agrilogistics (2022). Despite their differences in terms of cultural context, technical means, year of production, genre, budget, promotion, and reception, these films share a critical view of the traditional western division between humanity, animality, and the world of things. They encompass an animist perspective of reality, in the sense of acknowledging the agency of other-than-human animals and also supposedly inanimate objects made by human hands, such as industrial robots. Belonging to “shamanic cinema,” according to critics, they build bridges between the different worlds that conform to reality, intersecting with each other.