TIFF Interview: “The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs” Directors Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi

In The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, directors Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi follow indigenous Peruvian artist Sara Flores as her international star rises later in life. The septuagenarian is not only a creator of vibrant works rooted in the kené tradition of the Shipibo people, she is also a strong advocate for indigenous rights and climate justice. I reviewed the film during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (where it premiered) and also spoke with the directors there. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity. Gasull Balada is Spanish and Norzi is Italian. Both speak excellent English (they currently live in Brooklyn, NY), but where I have (rarely) felt the need to adjust their words to better fit American idioms, I have done so.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: I’d like to start by asking you to explain how you came to be involved with the Shipibo people and what role the Shipibo Conibo Center played in the making of the film.

Matteo Norzi: So, sometimes in life you get lost in a midlife crisis and need to travel far away to find yourself. And for me, that place was the Peruvian Amazon, the land of the great Shipibo-Conibo people. That first journey happened 15 years ago with the first collaboration that Elia and I did, on a film called Icaros: A Vision. During the afterlife of that film, we started to become aware of the social and economic reality of the indigenous communities of that area. We wanted to establish an organization that could somehow get involved and help. Since we received so much, we wanted to give back.

Èlia Gasull Balada: And then, in my case, I was introduced to the Shipibo community in 2014/2015 while editing one of my first movies in New York. I met them through the screen and started becoming familiar with their songs that they sing during ayahuasca ceremonies while editing Icaros. And a few years after, in 2019, I did my first trip to the Amazon in Pucallpa, where Sara lives. The trip came from a curiosity to find other societies that were less individualistic. I was really struggling with the individualism and transactionality of the West. I wanted to do a project there.

So, I started making a project as a visual artist with a group of Shipibo women who had been forcefully sterilized during the first Fujimori regime. I became involved doing some community organizing with them and traveling to the area a lot. And on one of these trips, I met Sara, and then I have followed the trajectory of the Shipibo Conibo Center since 2016, when it was formed. And in 2023, Mateo told me what was happening with Sara and we realized that there was a film to be made. And because we already had a deep bond and involvement with the community, we just dropped everything and went and spent the past three years making the movie.

CLR: Sara Flores paints in the kené designs of her people. Could you explain the principles behind kené?

MN: Kené is the design system that the Shipibo adopt to distinguish themselves from everybody else. It’s kind of like their flag. And it can be understood with three levels of meaning. It’s an expression of beauty, so there’s an aesthetic value that matches the energy of life growing. There is a synesthetic dimension, which is very relevant for how we also intended this film in which there is a crossover of the senses. This is the space of ayahuasca and shamanism in which sound can generate a visual response during the night of the journey launched by the psychedelic plant ayahuasca. And then there is an ethical component. It’s kind of a visual manifesto for life in balance in which the order of these geometric designs imposes itself over the disorder of violence, of wilderness.

EGB: Sara has been the most inventive kené painter in her community and has pushed the form forward in ways that no one did before. And we tried to develop a formal language that was the simplest possible to render the designs for what they are, using a lot of overhead shots to explain how Sara tackles the fabric from the center with no guides, no rulers, only the marks that are left from the folds of the fabric being folded. And then she develops the design from the center perfectly towards the corners and everything matches exactly geometrically and she has it all in her head.

So there is also a strong meditative component of her practice that we tried to render at the beginning of the film to ask the audience to slow down and pay attention and engage with the power of this art. The work is magnificent by itself. So we felt that we didn’t have to impose any gaze on it and could capture it in the simplest way. Later in the film we play with light a little bit, but we also let the designs vibrate and stand for what they are and we don’t do much with it because the work speaks for itself.

CLR: The work does speak for itself. You mentioned that you play with light a little bit: I love the shot where we see the shadows of the patterns on her face. And that brings me to your work with cinematographer Johan Carrasco Monzón. It’s an exquisitely photographed film. What was your approach to working with him?

EGB: Johan and I met in Berlin in 2023 in February. We were both part of the Berlinale and we connected immediately. And then when Mateo and I started making this movie, I told him, “Look, I’ve met this incredible cinematographer in Peru and I think he would be the right person to collaborate with us.” And then we had a lot of conversations with Johan from the beginning. We were lucky to bring him everywhere. He always traveled with us. He shot 95% of the film. We didn’t want to go to every city and hire a different cinematographer who maybe did not quite understand what we were doing. And I think that shows in the final result of the movie. What I think is most important for me is that we have a very similar understanding of cinema and the ethics of cinema, the morals of cinema: how you approach a character, how you show respect, how you place the camera, where and when do you take pauses, when do you get closer, when do you not get closer because you want to respect the emotion.

And we never had a conflict. We always wanted to approach it more or less the same way. We wanted to make it as cinematic as possible. We played with presence a lot, understanding that Sara’s presence in the world has a very unique power that’s different from a presence from someone else because of who she is, where she comes from, how she sees life and how she lives. We wanted that to be an inspiration for the audience to see, but also to act as a mirror so we can see ourselves in the film and also in the different context that Sara is part of and we can reflect on how we are also part of this context. And in order to do that in a subtle way for the audience not to feel that we are hammering them on their head and telling them what to think, we were the most understated and quiet as possible with the camera.

MN: I want to add that today, where cinema is so often based in identity politics, it was very important for our Director of Photography to be one with the right sensibility. Johan is indigenous himself. He’s not from the Amazon—he’s from the highlands of the Andes—but has that kind of understanding of familiar intimacy and a certain way of going about the world that was very much instrumental in creating this relationship with Sara’s family, because the story gets very intimate, as you were able to see for yourself.

CLR: Speaking of that intimacy, I wanted to know the story behind Sara’s tamarin monkey, Aminish. Not to take away from the many other qualities of your film, but I could have watched an entire feature about their relationship!

MN: There was a moment in time when we were trying to find the best way to have Sara deliver something deep and personal and it was not really coming through. And then we realized that the monkey was the person that she talks to. One day she said, “Nobody’s listening to me here. Come, Aminish. I have a few things to tell you.” And by hearing that kind of thing, we discovered there was a whole world between them. There is a scene in the film that we call the monkey monologue, which is kind of like stream-of-consciousness thoughts from Sara to her pet monkey that, as you said, could be a film in its own right.

EGB: For all of us, having the monkey on the shoot was an extra amusement and I think it’s very endearing to capture relationships of characters with animals and it gives you a different nuance of the character that you would not be able to capture in another way. And in this case, we were lucky that she had this monkey and we could explore it even through video calls and in many different situations.

MN: Let me add something. As we mentioned, Sara belongs to the Shipibo, and “shipi” means monkey, tamarin monkey. So it’s really their alter ego; they have a very strong relationship with this species.

CLR: It’s an adorable animal and such a small monkey, so cute.

EGB: I can add something else, too, because I’ve seen it with other Shipibo women. I think their connection with motherhood and matriarchy is so strong that some women, when they have all their children grown, they keep raising animals. They have either a parrot or they have a monkey or they have both. And for me, it’s an extension of motherhood for them because the animal is the next baby in the house.

CLR: As a pet owner, myself, I understand. I wanted to end by asking you where things stand right now with some of the issues beyond art that you pursue in the film. There is obviously a new Fujimori regime in Peru; not the most progressive family. We see a lot about illegal logging that’s tolerated by the government. Where do things stand now in terms of deforestation? Is it continuing at the same pace? Has there been any success from what we see happen in the film?

MN: The life of an environmental activist is very difficult because you keep on losing. So I don’t have a very hopeful answer for you. Unfortunately, this is a moment in time that is very paradoxical because we in the West discover the art and the culture of indigenous people at the very moment in which their life is vanishing. So, obviously, the film has a militant component in the second half and this political awakening that changes and surprises the audience a little bit. But through the work of the Shipibo Conibo Center, which is the not-for-profit organization that produced the film, we would now love if the film could help the organization raise attention and funds to keep empowering indigenous guards and the land defenders who are at the forefront of this battle against cocaine producers, the palm-oil industry, the Mennonites—which here in Canada are very well-known—and many other forms of land encroachment.

EGB: What we hope is that through the impact campaign that we will have after the premiere of the film, we will be able to feature the work of the indigenous guards to self-organize, because when the government fails you, you have to find ways to defend your own territory and to self-defend and self-organize. And what we think is happening now is that there seems to be more interest globally from certain private funds to invest money to support these kinds of groups that cannot find the support that they need within the country. We hope that through the movie we will be able to connect or open those avenues, with new funding to make the Guardia stronger, to get them more boats, more pickup trucks, more GPS units, more technology that they need to monitor their own territories and to keep doing the work because some of the work that they’re doing, it is working. We just need to put it out there and demonstrate how it works to keep attracting funding for it, even if it’s from somewhere else.

CLR: Well, thank you so much for making this film and addressing these important issues.

EGB: Thanks so much.

MN: Thank you so much for the great questions.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.