The Fashion in Film Festival in collaboration with CREAM present the screening programmes Weaving Rituals, Unravelling Cosmovisions and Uýra—The Rising Forest, guest curated by Dr. Mariana Cunha.
The programmes are part of the festival’s 8th edition, GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, which takes cinema as a lens through which to consider the complex entanglements between fashion and nature. Both screenings will take place on May 22, 2025, at Regent Street Cinema.
Screening details:
Weaving Rituals, Unravelling Cosmovisions
22 May 2025, 16h00
Free admission, booking required. Book tickets here
This programme showcases three artists’ films exploring Indigenous and pre-Hispanic rituals and practices in Latin America that reveal a deep connection to their territories and cosmologies. The films offer a glimpse into the role of textiles as performance tools and means for handicraft practices that fall radically apart from Western capitalist notions of labour. All three works explore the resonance between bodies, territories, and textiles, with a profound reverence for ancient knowledge systems that consider the natural world not as resource but as relation. From the backstrap looms of Mesoamerica to the waterways of Mapuche lands to the threatened shores of Chile, these films document living traditions of material engagement that reframe textile’s relationship with nature. Rather than extraction and consumption, we witness cycles of creation where human hands work in dialogue with fibres and flowing waters. Each filmmaker captures the intimate choreography between maker and material – a dance of reciprocity honouring the ecological origins of textile and craft. In a time when fashion seeks sustainability, these Indigenous practices offer not merely technical solutions but profound cosmological reorientations that challenge us to reimagine our entanglement with the living world as one of kinship rather than conquest.
Introduction by Mariana Cunha.
This programme is guest-curated by Mariana Cunha (CREAM, University of Westminster). With special thanks to May Adadol Ingawanij and Christel Tsilibaris.
22 May 2025, 18h30
Free admission, booking required. Book tickets here
In a journey through their native Amazon Forest, Uýra, a transgender Indigenous artist, uses performance art to unite LGBTQIAP+ and environmental movements. Inspired by the knowledge of plants and their ecological cycles, Uýra’s performances emerge as resistance against structural racism and environmental crimes. The documentary establishes a dialogue between Uýra’s use of organic and inorganic materials in creating their costumes and makeup – from plants, seeds, flowers, and wood to fabric, plastic, waste, and paint – and their pedagogical and activist work with Indigenous youth in preserving ancestral knowledge. Embodying the forest itself, Uýra’s transformations reclaim the body as sacred territory – a living metaphor for lands under threat. Their queer ecology weaves together ancestral wisdom with contemporary queer resistance, creating a radical reimagining of human relationships with nature. By dissolving boundaries between body and environment, Uýra’s performances germinate trans-specific alliances and offer a powerful alternative to extractive practices that exploit Amazon territories and marginalized bodies.
Introduction by Mariana Cunha.
This programme is guest-curated by Mariana Cunha (CREAM, University of Westminster). With special thanks to May Adadol Ingawanij and Christel Tsilibaris.