Toroboro: The name of the Plants

Now the Ecuadorian filmmaker Manolo Sarmiento reunites those researchers with the community for a new expedition: to give thousands of plants, many of them threatened with extinction, a scientific name alongside the name the Waorani have always known them by.

Out of that simple, quietly astonishing task, Sarmiento draws a far larger story. As an elder recites the names of trees the visiting translators cannot even identify, the film asks what knowledge really is, and who gets to author it — becoming a chronicle of a people shaped by generations of colonization, missionary contact and the advancing violence of the oil and timber industries. Patient and clear-eyed, Toroboro is at once an elegy for a vanishing wisdom and an act of preservation in itself.

To open the screening, we are joined by ethnobotanist Aida Cuni-Sanchez, Associate Professor at NMBU's Noragric institute and a specialist in tropical forests and the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous and local communities. She will help set the film's themes — botanical knowledge, biodiversity and the people who safeguard it — in a wider context.