What can we learn from women in Ecuador where they are deeply connected to their landscapes and communities and where these impacts are felt first?
‘Ceibo’, a new film by Maddie Meddings, Lucy Small and Pacha Light, aims to answer that question as they journey across Ecuador. From the land rights struggles of the Andes and the Amazon, to an Olympic surfer who has carved out a path for women, to the fight to protect the waters of the Galapagos Islands, Ceibo explores some of the most important struggles of our time. Along the way, Pacha untangles her own evolving identity as she reconnects with her Ecuadorian roots and embraces what it means to be Ecuadorian.
The film is set to premiere in Sydney on 8 April at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington before touring around Australia for the rest of the month. To check out more of the dates and to purchase tickets click here.
In addition to the film, Lucy wrote a behind the scenes piece on their Ecuador adventure which features in Issue 601 of our mag. You can check out an excerpt from that story below:
So, we travelled to Ecuador together in early 2024 to embark on a journey exploring what it means to be Ecuadorian, retracing the steps of Pacha’s origins, from the Andes to the city where her father lived on the mainland coastline. Travelling the coast in search of waves and heading to the Galapagos Islands to surf the passing pulses of the Pacific Ocean. We even crossed the Andes and wound our way down into the Amazon rainforest, learning about the threats to communities, waterways and ecosystems posed by mining in the region. The trip didn’t start well with the Ecuadorian government declaring a state of emergency the night before Maddie and I were meant to fly out to meet up with Pacha who was already in country.
The leader of a gang had escaped from prison in the southern city of Guayaquil and varying degrees of chaos had ensued. While he was captured not long after, there was some opportunistic looting taking place in different towns and cities across the country and while I was in the air on the way to Los Angeles a group of young men dressed in balaclavas entered the studio of a news broadcast in Guayaquil and took the reporters hostage live on air. Apparently, they were just kids, and no one was hurt, but there was definitely some panic going on in our WhatsApp chat about whether we were going to be able to continue with our plans. In the end we decided just to delay for 24 hours to see if there were any more developments and then we proceeded to push on. And thankfully we did. We flew into Quito, met up with Pacha and headed straight into the Andes where it was quiet and felt so far away from anything else going on in the country.
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