For 20 years I have been researching, photographing and writing about Angel Falls, the highest waterfall on earth, in the Veneuelan Amazon. My fascination with the area began while traveling in the falls region researching information for a screenplay I was writing about Jimmie Angel in 1989. Since then, I worked with perseverance to uncover the mysteries, record and disseminate information about the land and the explorers who "discovered" and documented the falls in the mid 20th century, creating an international stir at the "unveiling" of what was considered the "lost world" of Conan Doyle's writings.

In 2003, just before hopping into a canoe that was to take me on a four-day canoe expedition to the base of the falls I met Kamarakoto Indian Hortensia Berti by chance. We engaged in a brief conversation: I asked if she knew of a Kamarakoto Chief named Calcaño whose brief description in Robertson's writings had greatly intrigued me. Her surprising answer gave a new focus to my work and THE MAKING OF A CHIEF was born. Calcaño was her great-grandfather, a visionary. He had been taken out of the jungle as a young boy to be educated by a white man. The first Pemón to learn to speak and write Spanish and to understand the workings of the white man's mind, Calcaño returned to his people a grown man and set out to change their fate and to prepare them for a dignified entry into modern civilization by zealously guarding the treasures of their culture and traditions. But his teachings had never been written down and were on the verge of disappearing with the elders of the tribe. A wide gap had grown between the elders who still spoke only their Pemón language and the young people lost under the pressures of mining, missionary education, visiting tourists and modern times. I discovered the unusual quest of the Kamarakoto people: to rescue Calcaño's teachings and recover their traditions, still lodged in the minds of the elders of the tribe, to pass them down to their children and the future generations. But they were at a loss of how to get the task done.

Simply put, I am making this film is because I know of no one else who can, and, from the Kamarakoto standpoint, anyone else who would be allowed to. I honestly do not think anyone could have uncovered the silent confusion of a proud and secretive people seeking their own identity. I often fly into the farthest regions. These trips have taken me into the terrain, the people, the hidden corners of the Amazon Indians' psyche, and their anxious relationship to the present.

It is estimated that every 14 days, one of the 7,000 known languages of the world disappears, and with it, a whole world of knowledge. The Pemón language the Kamarakotos speak (they are a sub-tribe of the Pemón people) is one of those disappearing languages. THE MAKING OF A CHIEF is a film that records history as it is vanishing. Every elder who dies takes away with him a body of knowledge, since none of the history of the Kamarakotos has been recorded.

I need to finish this film with urgency before the reality I began to record disappears.

Visit THE MAKING OF A CHIEF (formerly WOMEN OF THE FALLS) page at the New York Foudation for the Arts.

Visit the Angel Conservation page for THEMAKING OF A CHIEF (formerly WOMEN OF THE FALLS) and the Kamarakoto Cultural Identity Program.