« Wayumi » a film of one family’s journey of identity and belonging across two radically different worlds – and the sense of going back home…

Photo: Yarima

Wayumi is a feature-length documentary that traces the enthralling journey of David Good and his mother, Yarima, as they navigate two vastly different worlds and examine essential questions about family and community while overcoming cultural differences.

While giving a presentation at a University in which he describes what it was like the first time he had returned to the Amazon since he was a small child, David said: « As I went deeper and deeper into Yanomami land… I realized I wasn’t going to these lands for the first time. I was going back home. »

Photo: Young David with his mother, Yarima, in the Amazon

David Good comes from a unique background as the child of an American anthropologist and an Indigenous woman of the Yanomami people of the Venezuelan Amazon. Wayumi follows his efforts to overcome the challenges of the Amazon rainforest, bureaucratic obstacles and cultural barriers to reunite his family for the first time in 30 years.

Photo: David meeting with Yanomami men and boys

Raised in her Yanomami community in which sharing is the most admired human quality, Yarima lived six years with her family in the U.S. but could not fully adapt to the more individualized and consumer-oriented Western lifestyle.

Photo: David and Yarima in the U.S.

My own experiences traveling between France and time I spent among Yanomami communities in the Venezuelan and Brazilian Amazon regions during several months a year for a dozen years made me question all of the values that Western society represents. I felt more and more « at home » each time I returned to Yanomami communities.

It was devastating to see the increasing damage to forests and Indigenous people caused by gold mining and other extractive industries that destroy ecosystems and contaminate water, soil and wildlife with mercury, cyanure and other toxic substances.

We who live in Western societies should do our part to help Indigenous peoples globally by considering the impact of our shopping decisions. Please boycott all products from deforestation; gold, palm oil, gemstones, exotic wood, soy, beef, leather, etc.

Please take a moment to watch the extraordinary Wayumi film trailer here:

About Barbara Crane Navarro - Rainforest Art Project

I'm a French artist living near Paris. From 1968 to 1973 I studied at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, then at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, for my BFA. My work for many decades has been informed and inspired by time spent with indigenous communities. Various study trips devoted to the exploration of techniques and natural pigments took me originally to the Dogon of Mali, West Africa, and subsequently to Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil. Over many years, during the winters, I studied the techniques of traditional Bogolan painting. Hand woven fabric is dyed with boiled bark from the Wolo tree or crushed leaves from other trees, then painted with mud from the Niger river which oxidizes in contact with the dye. Through the Dogon and the Yanomami, my interest in the multiplicity of techniques and supports for aesthetic expression influenced my artistic practice. The voyages to the Amazon Rainforest have informed several series of paintings created while living among the Yanomami. The support used is roughly woven canvas prepared with acrylic medium then textured with a mixture of sand from the river bank and lava. This supple canvas is then rolled and transported on expeditions into the forest. They are then painted using a mixture of acrylic colors and Achiote and Genipap, the vegetal pigments used by the Yanomami for their ritual body paintings and on practical and shamanic implements. My concern for the ongoing devastation of the Amazon Rainforest has inspired my films and installation projects. Since 2005, I've created a perfomance and film project - Fire Sculpture - to bring urgent attention to Rainforest issues. To protest against the continuing destruction, I've publicly set fire to my totemic sculptures. These burning sculptures symbolize the degradation of nature and the annihilation of indigenous cultures that depend on the forest for their survival.

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