Ana Elena Tejera

Ana Elena Tejera is a Panamanian multidisciplinary artist working in the fields of film, performance and audio-visual installations. She started in cinema with a feature-length documentary film Panquiaco, that had its premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was nominated for the Goya Awards 2020 as Best Iberoamerican Film. Her short film A Love Song in Spanish premiered at the Berlinale and MoMA 2021. She extends cinema into audio-visual installations, expanded cinema performances, and virtual reality. Her works have been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Batalha Centro de Cinema, Galeria Solar, Panama Canal Museum, Cent-Quatre Paris and many others.

Filmography

2020 Documentary Panquiaco
2021 A Love Song in Spanish

Selected project: "Corte Culebra"

Production: Mestizo Cinema, Fulgurance

For the first time, Ernesto, a young Panamanian soldier enters the Panama Canal Zone, a territory occupied by the United States for 100 years, an area surrounded by abandoned military bases. Under the orders of the former head of the School of the Americas, Ernesto has the task of cleaning the waters of the Culebra Cut valley, a place where the remains of explosives used in the construction of the Canal were left behind and where Afro-descendant communities once lived. The unexpected encounter with Celia, one of the former inhabitants, who resisted in the jungle against the displacement of the American army, awakens Ernesto's vulnerable memories. Then an emancipatory state emerges from him, driven by Celia and by the desire to heal the land and his own wounds, he returns to inhabit the waters of the Culebra Cut, the lands of his ancestors.