This video essay is best viewed on a handheld device.

On December 8, 2024, four Afro-Ecuadorian children between the ages of 11 and 15 were reported missing after a football game in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Family members and activists urgently demanded public attention through social media. Nevertheless, the disappearances were largely overlooked by state officials and mainstream media. Two weeks later, surveillance footage revealed that the children had been illegally detained and abused by military personnel. The video circulated in local and international news, prompting further investigations that eventually confirmed intentional concealment. Locally, the tragedy came to be known as the “Caso Malvinas.”

While this description may present a vivid and even empathetic summary, it is precisely the detachment of academic prose that fails to communicate the extent of its embodied response. Theories on policing and surveillance pale in comparison to the pain experienced by the family and friends of Ismael, Nehemías, Josué, and Steven. Like an automated, AI-generated translation, scholarly analysis may offer an appearance of objectivity and accuracy. Yet, in the context of Caso Malvinas, this appearance becomes an unsettling, tone-deaf constraint.

Tina Campt turns to opacity, as theorised by Édouard Glissant, to explain an “incapacity of others to understand or inhabit” her personal grief, in this case related to the loss of her auntie and father during the pandemic (Campt 2022, 104). Rather than attempting to overcome this limitation in the name of comprehension—what Glissant terms “transparency” (1990)—Campt reflects on alternatives to “describe the indescribable opacity of grief” for contemporary Black lives (2022, 108). In this process, the “whispers” and “hums” of her late relatives emerge as poetic and embodied expressions of grief, both personally and collectively.

Caso Malvinas poses a similar question: What is a visual language for that grief, and how (if at all) can it be analysed?

Compared to traditional scholarship or explanatory approaches to videographic criticism, an embodied disposition toward video essay practice can potentially unsettle these hierarchies (Binotto 2024). Catherine Grant emphasises embodiment as “a form of understanding with the hands and eyes,” which can help establish “a relation of care and concernful dealings” (2014, 50). Javier Ramírez and Desirée de Jesús suggest an approach that “sees, hears, moves, and pulses with the rhythms of the cinematic bodies it examines” (2025). Similarly, Campt proposes a mode of attunement when engaging images of Black subjects, moving beyond looking toward attending to “the sonic frequency of images” (2017, 71).

This video essay approaches Caso Malvinas—and specifically the surveillance footage of the detention—by acknowledging these overlapping conditions:

Images of Black lives in Guayaquil have historically been associated with precarity and marginality. Guayaquil hosts the largest Afro-descendant population in Ecuador, with sectors such as Isla Trinitaria concentrating a significant percentage. Elsewhere, I have analysed how audiovisual images from these spaces—whether produced by Black filmmakers or depicting these neighbourhoods—are often read through a framework of precarity that relegates them from local canons (Miño Puga 2023). Las Malvinas is subject to similar representations, made legible as prone to violence and crime. In this context, the brutality inflicted on Black bodies in Caso Malvinas draws on these historical continuities, including those that emerged during the COVID-19.

Reporter Matías Zibell attempted to “describe the indescribable” in an article about COVID-19 in Guayaquil. Beyond the journalistic rigour of the piece, his concluding words now take on further resonance: “El horror, el horror” (2020). At the height of the pandemic, Guayaquil’s mortality rate surpassed that of entire countries, with drone footage becoming a crucial tool for exposing the mishandling of bodies and other inadequacies (McDonald et al. 2020). The verticality of drones provided a default mode of pandemic witnessing, arguably constituting a new, specific genre (Zimmermann and Kaplan 2020; Baishya 2022).

Textually, the surveillance video from Caso Malvinas operates in a similar register, relying on distance to accentuate its perceived neutrality. Yet what is missing from this so-called “neutrality” is opacity itself—what Glissant describes as “that which cannot be reduced” (Glissant 1990, 191), signalling both an ethical stance and a limit to comprehension.

Approaching this footage through an embodied videographic practice (MacLeod 2023) is not intended to impose further scrutiny or policing. Rather, it reveals how the footage itself is shaped by, and gives rise to, embodied conditions of experience.

In other words, it enacts an inhabited right to opacity.

The video essay makes this embodied opacity perceptible. Repetition, slow motion, and freeze-frame help accentuate its digital “handling,” making visible the otherwise overlooked gestures that encode the ethical and affective stakes of the footage: from the seemingly innocuous cursor movements of technical staff to the explicit demands for justice by Assemblywoman Paola Cabezas during a virtual National Assembly meeting, the first instance in which this footage was widely broadcast.

This handling also encompasses my own embodiment, positionality, and conscious manipulation of the so-called “media object.” As a mestizo scholar from Guayaquil, now based in New Zealand but raised within walking distance of the incident, I cannot negate the sensorial memory of this urban landscape, inevitably permeating my perspective. Therefore, the decision to use vertical landscape mode (Lacurie, 2024) and doomscrolling (Ahwesh and Goldsmith 2023, 183) are intended precisely to heighten this reality, with my tactile navigation serving to visualise, in a loose and provisional way, my own (and others’) embodied grappling with the suffering of those nearby.

What this analysis shows is that the visual language of grief cannot escape embodiment, even when heavily mediated by the expected transparency of digital technologies. The detention footage in Caso Malvinas treads a fine line between recoil and confrontation, which speak of its opacity. Its “whispers and hums” are marked by the glitches and distortions of digital media, but also by the inaudible tonalities of a compound sense of loss and despair. In an environment that prioritises political savviness and opportunism, the outcry of Afro-Latino spirits emerges as a fitting lament, a way to dissipate the horror.

Dr Maria Fernanda Miño is a film scholar and practitioner specialising in Ecuadorian and Latin American cinemas. She is the author of Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2023), which examines narrative, aesthetic, and production practices in contemporary Ecuadorian cinema. Her research engages audiovisual archives and emerging approaches to videographic criticism within film and media studies. More recently, her work explores the concept of Buen Vivir (Good Living) in Indigenous film and media, particularly in relation to decolonial thought and the Rights of Nature. Her publications also address political documentary, collective memory, participatory video, and local identities in Latin America, with a broader interest in the ethical and political dimensions of film and media.

Ahwesh, Peggy, and Leo Goldsmith. 2023. “Ins and Outtakes: An Interview.” In Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, eds. Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon. University of California Press.

Baishya, Anirban K. 2022. “Through a Drone Darkly: Drone Media as Pandemic Witnessing.” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 13(1): 24–32.

Binotto, Johannes. 2024. “Unsettling Bodies: Video Essay as Embodied Research.” Academic Quarter | Akademisk Kvarter, August 31, 57–70.

Campt, Tina. 2017. Listening to Images. Duke University Press.

Campt, Tina. 2022. “The Opacity of Grief.” BOMB Magazine 158 (January): 102–9.

Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing. Penguin Classics.

Grant, Catherine. 2014. “The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking.” Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento 1(1): 49–62.

Lacurie, Occitane. 2024. “Xena’s Body.” NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies 13(1): 358–361.

McDonald, Brent, Lise Josefsen Hermann, and Ivan Castaneira. 2020. “How Ecuador’s Port City Became a Coronavirus Epicenter.” New York Times, April 21.

McLeod, Dayna. 2023. “Embodied Media Encounters.” Ways of Doing.

Miño Puga, Dr María Fernanda. 2023. “Jackson Jickson: Exposed Insularities in Guerrilla Filmmaking from ‘The Trinity Island.’” Frames Cinema Journal 21 (July).

Ramirez, Javier, and Desirée de Jesús. 2025. “Introduction: Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms.” in[Transition] 12(4).

Zibell, Matías. 2020. “Coronavirus en Ecuador: El Drama de Guayaquil, Que Tiene Más Muertos Por Covid-19 Que Países Enteros y Lucha a Contrarreloj Para Darles Un Entierro Digno.” BBC Mundo (Ecuador), April 1.

Zimmermann, Patricia, and Caren Kaplan. 2020. “Coronavirus Drone Genres: Spectacles of Distance and Melancholia.” Film Quarterly 30 (April).

As both the video-essayist and the journalist conclude: the horror, the horror. “Ismael, Nehemías, Josué, and Steven” centers on the four Ecuadorian boys that were killed in Guayaquil and are the protagonists of the video essay that bears their names. From the start the piece highlights the impossibility of expressing the grief for these young people whose lives were senselessly taken from them. Miño begins to process her reflections alongside the words of reporting, outrage from representatives, and eventually impunity.

I watched and then read this piece feeling like Miño was creating an archive that would otherwise be buried in a white-washed news cycle of business-as-usual despite the violent death of four young people by the police. Miño’s piece weaves together sound, image, interviews, and lyrics as she navigates the websites, videos, outcries, and eventually musical homages to these boys. On her phone screen, she shuttles between limited footage, locations of the tragedy, lyrics, funerals, official declarations, and later state impunity; the video-essayist offers a choreography of wading through injustice. Shifting to salsa music, the video essay feels like a tonal switch, yet Miño carefully connects the horror of the brutal killing of the four young Black Ecuadorian boys to the accepted quotidian forms of racism normalized in a popular salsa. The upbeat lyrics reveal a system of daily double racial standards.

Despite the impunity of the state police, the young boys’ lives do not remain ungrieved. Instead, Miño weaves together the musical forms of grieving, paying public homage that the Afro-Ecuadorian population offered in honor of the four young boys. As Arenillas and Furtado write in their introduction on “Justicia y ley en el cine documental en América Latina” (“Justice and the law in the Latin American documentary film”), in cases where justice and law are impossible, documentary can become an alternative act of justice through other means unrelated to punishment and legal rights (my translation). Arenillas and Furtado point to poetic justice and alternative justice through the arts as a possible means for justice far from legal codes, which is what we see in the final chapter of Miño’s piece.

In her accompanying text, Miño combines Glissant’s concept about the right to opacity along with the embodiment of academic work. It made me think of how often the worlds we study seem so far away in time (historical), or distance—in her case, Ecuador and New Zealand. Despite this physical distance she is deeply linked to “Ismael, Nehemías, Josué, and Steven” and while not revealing all, she makes visible various threads that are braided together that witness while also creating an homage to their lives. This video essay and accompanying text travel in the opposite direction of the distance of much academic work, asking how does one capture an injustice that is so close to home emotionally? How does one capture something as intangible as grief? How does one think through ways of bearing witness when systems try to erase that which is most important? That is what she has done here. “Ismael, Nehemías, Josué, and Steven.” The horror. The horror.

Furtado, G., and Arenillas, M. G. (2019). Introducción al dossier: “Justicia y ley en el cine documental en América Latina”. Revista Cine Documental, (20), 4–13.

Say. Their. Names. And feel them in your hands.

This is a smart and really perceptive piece that demands that the viewer share in the experience with the practitioner by putting the experience in the hands of the viewer—and I mean this last part literally, as it demands to be viewed on a smaller, portable screen instead of on a larger format or monitor. It’s necessary for us to keep turning the screen in our hands, which makes it a relatively unique entry at [in]Transition. The essay starts in landscape mode and then switches to portrait mode as we follow—and feel—the crafter herself attempt to process el caso Malvinas on her phone. Miño references Occitane Lacurie’s excellent video essay “Xena’s Body” as inspirational, a piece whose accompanying text begins: “How close is my phone to my body?” Likewise here, by forcing us to keep turning our devices, Miño makes conscious the relationship through embodied practice between viewing device and the body, how one might materialize the other.

And yet there is a distance, too, one that is painful and frustrating. We can also see that Miño (like us, most probably) is far away from Guayaquil, with her phone telling us that she is in Wellington. At once, we are brought close to the actions that are exacted on these boys; at once, we also feel the anguished distance—Ecuador to New Zealand to wherever we are—that Miño feels as she watches the footage, returns to it, zooms in on it.

There is very little scholarship in Ecuadorian media practice in general, a major lacunae of Latin American scholarship, so this video essay is particularly welcome. The methodology Miño uses here of insisting that we view this on our phones, in our hands, turns our regular video essay viewing into something active, along the lines of the political acts demanded by the New Latin American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s: if Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino once wrote that the camera is “a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second” (1969, 127), this video essay shows (once again) how technology can be put in our palms as a political tool and asks us as an individual to respond.

Interestingly, no one in the video essay actually says their names out loud. Their names appear on screen in silence, as the title of the piece, again forcing us to remember them against the deafening silence that the police would have preferred to condemn them. Ismael. Nehemías. Josué. Steven. Say their names.

Getino, Octavio, and Fernando Solanas. 1969. “Toward a Third Cinema” Tricontinental 14: 107–132.

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