CHAPTER 16 “Toward a Cinema for Life”: The Activism of the Escuela de Cine Amazónico Claudia Arteaga The Escuela de Cine Amazónico (ECA) (Amazonian Film School) was founded in the city of Pucallpa in the Amazonian region of Ucayali in 2013, thanks to an alliance of representatives of various indepen- dent businesses: Fernando Valdivia Gómez, documentary filmmaker and founder of Teleandes producciones , from Lima; Carlos Marín, filmmaker and head of the Cayumba Cine Production Company , from Tingo María; and Kathy Quio, activist and founder of Jóvenes Promotores en Derechos Humanos (Young Promoters of Human Rights), from Pucallpa. 1 This school is much more than an audiovisual training center. Valdivia (2019), its current director, defines it as an independent cultural space for commu- nity gathering, collaboration, and management, operating in the areas of education, production, and dissemination of films made by residents of the Amazonian region. According to Valdivia, the ECA proposes to foster an “audiovisual activism” able to “make visible, inform about, and raise awareness of contemporary Amazonian socio-environmental issues that C. Arteaga (B ) Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: carteaga@scrippscollege.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_16 303