A journey through the Darién begins with an absence in The Dance of the Kokorrdit: a sacred bird is missing. The film follows Areo, a Wounaan community leader, and his niece Ayned into the rainforest in search of it. On October 8, the University of Washington will host a Seattle Latino Film Festival presentation with filmmakers Guido Bilbao and Elio Cunampio. The university’s September 24 announcement identifies Cunampio as an Indigenous Emberá filmmaker from Panama.
That identification matters alongside the story’s Wounaan setting. The names refer to specific peoples; a regional label cannot substitute for them. The event brings the film and members of its team into the same room, providing an opportunity to ask about the relationship between the people making the work and the community whose territory and traditions shape it.
The 2026 International Film Festival of Panama catalog describes Ayned as a teenager living in Panama City who has become distant from her community’s language and traditions. Her journey with her uncle joins a family relationship to the search for the bird. The catalog lists a Panama–Mexico production, directed by Bilbao and Elio B. Cunampio, in Spanish and Wounaan. Its premise connects cultural transmission with pressures on the land.
Bilbao supplied an earlier account of the project in his own essay for Revista de la Universidad de México. Writing before the film’s release, he described five years of development with collaborators and work undertaken with the Congreso Wounaan. He also recalled preparing for a monthlong trip across the Darién, relying on the support and guidance of Indigenous communities. That first-person account establishes a production history without turning a later festival listing into evidence of how the work was made.
The film recently appeared at AFI Silver, which billed its September 26 opening as a U.S. premiere and identified deforestation and threats to ancestral land among its concerns. The program also lists both Wounaan and Spanish. These details keep the film’s cultural and environmental questions connected: the missing bird belongs to a story about the place in which people live and the knowledge they pass on.
The Seattle organizers’ event page schedules the October 8 presentation from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Oceanography Teaching Building, room 014. A discussion with members of the filmmaking team is planned. For an audience encountering the project for the first time, that conversation is part of the occasion’s value. It can give the filmmakers room to explain the collaboration and choices behind a journey whose starting point is a community’s own search.