Episode Details

Paul Keating and DirectorHodl come on the show to talk about Hummingbird, the documentary they just released on IndeeHub. The film started life as a small video idea for Bitcoin Jungle and grew over a couple of years into a feature-length meditation on indigenous prophecy, the fiat system, and the strange gravitational pull of one small town in Costa Rica.

The philosophical spine of the film is the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor, which is unpacked in some depth during the conversation. The eagle represents the engineering mind that builds and abstracts. The condor represents the body and its way of living in relation to the land. The prophecy holds that these were once in balance, then tipped toward the eagle after European contact around 1500, and that the current 500-year cycle is meant to bring them back together to birth a third bird called the Hummingbird, which carries both.

The film weaves that mythological frame together with the very grounded story of Estella, a Costa Rican farmer who lost money to a bank, fought off corporate pressure to take her land for monoculture planting, and through her daughter Kena became the connective tissue of what eventually grew into the Bitcoin Jungle community. She now has a sign at the farmers market reading La Abuelita del Bitcoin. The IMF loans, the structural adjustment programmes, the resource stripping all sit in the film as the practical machinery by which the eagle mindset extended its reach into the global south.

The rest of the hour wanders into the realities of making the film. Roughly twenty hours of footage. DirectorHodl editing essentially solo, watching the cut something like a hundred times, finishing only when he reached the right level of crazy. Paul talks about the strange productivity tax of living somewhere as beautiful as Uvita, where the days are short and the sun pulls you out of the chair. DirectorHodl suggests you visit, you pick up the energy, and you carry it home.

Hummingbird is on IndeeHub now, with a free YouTube release planned for the coming weeks, and it premieres at the Bitcoin Film Fest in Warsaw in early June.

Links

• Hummingbird on IndeeHub
• Finding Home Episode 4 [Discount code: PIONEER21]
• Revolution.Rocks
• BTC Prague Discount code (15%) – NOSTR