Juan Francisco Valdez

From an academic background in Ecuador and France in the field of ethnology, archeology and prehistory, he finds in the audiovisual perspective, a tool and a language that provokes a different interaction with the human being. With this he specialized in Paris X with the Master in Documentary and Visual Anthropology, directing his first ethnographic documentary in 2014. Back in Ecuador in 2015, as a professor at the Universidad de las Américas, Juan Francisco carried out several academic research projects from the perspective of the anthropological documentary.

Currently in Barcelona, after finishing a specialization as a director of photography, Juan Francisco completed his doctoral training in social anthropology at the University of Barcelona. As part of his doctoral research, he worked with Kichwa ethnic groups in the high Amazon region of Ecuador, studying the impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic and the response of Amazonian peoples to the health crisis. From an anthropological-documentary perspective, this research reflects the dialogue and the relationship with non-humans from the responses to the pandemic along with the proposals of alternative models for the restoration of the environment from their cosmology. This last documentary project “Los Sabios del Bosque Amazónico” (The Wise Men of the Amazon Forest) is currently in post-production.