That Dior collaboration is among the late-career milestones included in The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, directed by Norzi and Icaros editor \u00c8lia Gasull Balada, a portrait of the septuagenarian Flores, her art and its roots in her community, which is now threatened by the deforestation of the Amazon. Assembled from footage shot over the last few years, The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs is, on the one hand, practically structureless\u2014it seems to end when Norzi and Balada finished filming, rather than the other way around\u2014but on the other hand, formally uncommon among documentaries about long-overlooked artists. Foregoing talking heads, rote exposition and special pleading in favour of a v\u00e9rit\u00e9 style, it readily fosters appreciation for an artist\u2019s remarkable practice.<\/p>\n
The film begins in the Amazon, with lush nature footage depicting Flores in nature, paddling out into the jungle with a machete and hacking away at the yacushapana bark that will be boiled down into brown dye. Closeups of green leaves veined in hot pink, spiderwebs and the spiky stalks of jungle plants mirror the honeycomb patterns scored by Flores into her raw cotton canvas.<\/p>\n
Flores works with her daughters and granddaughters\u2014though she was the first ken\u00e9artist to sign her work, beginning in the 1970s, on the advice of a visiting anthropologist, the matrilineal handing-down of the tradition effectively means it is created in a model similar to a workshop. She draws the shapes freehand, expanding outward from the initial marks to create fractalised repeated shapes, like the branching of a tree, even down to the leaves shaded green with pigment extracted from leaves. In folk-art terms, the effect is similar in its organic fastidiousness to mandalas, or to henna or M\u0101ori tattooing; or, in Modernist terms, it resembles a cross between an Agnes Martin grid painting and William Morris wallpaper, or perhaps as if Piet Mondrian had been obsessed with the rainforest canopy instead of city streets.<\/p>\n
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Sara Flores \u00a9 2025 Prin Rodriguez, courtesy the Shipibo-Conibo Center<\/p>\n
Flores is ken\u00e9\u2019s ambassador abroad. The film follows her to a number of shows, including at New York\u2019s Clearing<\/a> in 2023; at White Cube (which now represents her, thanks in part to Norzi\u2019s connections) in London<\/a> in 2025; and in Paris. She says she is more appreciated abroad than at home in Peru, where her eventual retrospective at Lima\u2019s Museo de Arte\u2014the institution\u2019s first-ever solo exhibition dedicated to an Indigenous artist\u2014forms something close to a climax for the film. The directors pointedly juxtapose ken\u00e9canvases with art from the museum\u2019s permanent collection depicting conquest and Christian conversion.<\/p>\n The film somewhat overindexes its New York scenes (the Shipibo-Conibo Center is New York-based). There are only so many times that the filmmakers can depict Flores wandering forlornly at a glamorous art opening, contemplating the canap\u00e9s or observing the celebrities at Dior\u2019s 2024 runaway show at the Brooklyn Museum, followed by a hard cut back to the Amazon.<\/p>\n In fact, Flores in the film says that she loves to travel, and she enjoys the spoils of her late-in-life fame. Her work takes her away from home\u2014several scenes show Flores in a hotel room, FaceTiming her family and her beloved pet tamarin\u2014but her global visibility is, she makes clear, necessary and political. Proceeds from sales of her work go to her family and to organisations working toward Indigenous self-governance, and throughout the film she is shown accompanying and supporting the Indigenous guards who patrol the Amazon to protect it from settlers and illegal lumber operations destroying the Shipibo-Conibo habitat.<\/p>\n The film demonstrates a common dilemma of the folk artist: the aesthetic tradition practiced by Flores is canonised, even as the way of life from which it is inseparable faces erasure. And to this, there is added another complication: Flores, afflicted with cramping hands and other assorted frailties and indignities of aging, now struggles with the minute details of ken\u00e9, endangering her work in another way. It is sad to consider, but also moving confirmation of her work\u2019s connection to both the physical body and natural world.<\/p>\n