Our participation in Locarno BaseCamp
among.earth was part of Locarno BaseCamp 2026, represented by our founder Abdel Mandili. BaseCamp is unlike most industry rooms: for eleven days, two hundred young creatives (filmmakers, but also musicians, designers, and writers) live and work under one roof. There is no hierarchy of disciplines.
Indigenous cinema is still most often invited into the film industry as subject matter, rarely as authorship: a story to be discovered, packaged, and carried out by someone else. Being inside BaseCamp, alongside talents from every background and none of the usual gatekeeping, made the absence of that hierarchy feel less like an ideal and more like a working model.
Spaces like BaseCamp show that the industry knows how to build a room without a hierarchy. Indigenous cinema needs the industry to build more of them.
