Friday, 1 March 2013, 6.00-7.30pm, Room B33, Malet Street (Entrance via Torrington Place), Birkbeck, University of London

Conceived as a visual ethnography of the religious experience during the Holy Week of Huaraz, Peru, this film focuses on a group of processional images known as Jewish and Roman soldiers, which were miraculously saved from destruction in the devastating 1970 earthquake. Considered saints by their owners and devotees, these soldiers are at the core of a tense dialogue between folk and orthodox forms of Catholic cult in the region.

Q&A with film director Aristóteles Barcelos Neto will follow the screening.

Aristóteles Barcelos Neto lectures in the Arts of the Americas at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas, University of East Anglia. He is an anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork with the Wauja Indians of Amazonia and with urban and rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. He has produced documentary films about his fieldwork and built extensive collections of ethnographic material. He is interested in visual anthropology, ritual and cosmology, and Amerindian Christianity, which is the focus of his current research.