Ambassador’s Voice | Paulina Donoso

An Ecuadorian filmmaker, Director of Artificial Intelligence at the Malgallo agency and a member of Ecuador's National Academy of Cinema, Paulina Donoso works where immersive technology, committed storytelling and human rights meet. Her virtual-reality documentary When Silence Talks, recognized at IDFA, carried a Latin American voice onto the international stage. As an ambassador of the We Are Human Festival, she holds to a conviction as simple as it is uncompromising: AI should amplify the voices of the Global South, not erase them.

«Don't create what the world expects of you, create what only you can bring into being»: Paulina Donoso, a filmmaker of the augmented real

 

For Paulina Donoso, technology is never the starting point. It is an answer, never the first question. With her, everything begins with a human problem that refuses the easy path. When Silence Talks grew out of one such problem: how do you speak about sexual violence without letting the way you tell the story reproduce that violence? Rather than a documentary in which the audience watches testimony from a distance, she chose to explore silence itself: what goes unsaid, what hides, what has to be rebuilt from fragments. The experience unfolds across five environments, on a logic close to that of an escape room: you explore, you listen, you uncover traces, and you slowly piece together what happened. The project was recognized at IDFA, at the XR Development Market of the NewImages Festival in Paris and as far away as Chile, proof that a story told from Ecuador, on an intimate and difficult subject, could reach audiences worlds apart.

 

At the 33rd edition of MixBrasil, André Fischer made a bold bet: launching a competition entirely dedicated to works created with AI. The result exceeded his expectations. Out of nearly 80 films produced with AI tools the previous year, 24 were selected, among them films from countries never before represented at the festival, such as Bangladesh. "AI has opened an unprecedented geographical and cultural door," he observes. But what he saw in these works also alarmed him: algorithms massively reproduce the stereotypes of their databases, built predominantly by white American men. Filmmaker Igi Lola Ayedun had to generate the same scene 200 times before the algorithm finally respected a Black representation faithful to reality.

 

«Correction is possible, but it requires constant human effort. That is why we must occupy the digital space, not leave it vacant.»

 

But its heart lies elsewhere, in an ethical demand she states plainly. "When you work with trauma, the goal is never to make suffering more spectacular. I am not trying to make the viewer live through someone else's pain; that would be a kind of fraud. I want to open a space where people listen differently, understand differently, and perhaps leave with a little more empathy." That, she says, is where her way of working shifted. "The most important question was never what the technology can do. It is what human experience we are responsible for creating with it."

 

The same thread runs through The Shaman Light, her virtual-reality piece on the Amazonian worldview shown at the NewImages Festival. An Amazonian worldview cannot be captured through linear explanation: territory, nature, spirituality, memory and community are bound together, and virtual reality makes it possible to build a space where all of it can coexist. "For me, technology always comes after the human question, never before. I do not begin by asking which tool I will use, but: whose story is this? Why should it be told? What is my responsibility, as a creator, in carrying it?" A sophisticated tool does not, on its own, produce a sophisticated story. "Technology has to stay in the service of meaning."

 

«Not waiting for the future, but building it»

 

Working between Ecuador, Argentina and Panama taught her one thing. Latin America's strength lies in its stories, its identities, its memory; its fragility lies in everything that surrounds them: intermittent funding, public policies with no continuity, distribution networks that are too scarce, and worlds that ignore one another, universities on one side, institutions and companies on the other. Hence her conviction: "We are not just a territory that supplies stories for others to discover. We can produce innovation, we can invent new formats." In Ecuador the industry is still small, but she sees the disadvantage turned on its head. "Being small can also be a strength: it makes us agile. New technologies are bringing down certain barriers for countries that long had less access to large infrastructure."

 

It is in this spirit that she approaches AI, not as a promise handed down from elsewhere, but as a political matter. As Director of Artificial Intelligence at Malgallo, she brings tools such as ChatGPT, Google Flow, Claude and ElevenLabs into the agency's creative process. Yet the real shift, to her mind, is not technical, it is cultural. "People are right to wonder whether these tools will replace them. My job is to move the question along: from replacement to argument. AI can generate a thousand possibilities; it does not know why a story matters to a particular community." And if Latin America settles for consuming these systems without questioning the cultural assumptions built into them, it will grow technically sophisticated and culturally invisible. "I want Latin American creators not only to use AI, but to help shape its narratives, its aesthetics, its ethics and its future."

 

«Let dignity outlast the technology»

 

In Latin America, human rights are anything but abstract. The continent's history has taught, often painfully, that dignity, freedom, equality and memory are things that must be defended, and defended again. That experience gives Paulina Donoso a very concrete view of AI. "Talking about AI and human rights means asking very concrete questions: who is represented in the training data? Whose language is understood? Whose memory is preserved? Who has access to these tools, who benefits from them, who is left out? And who is accountable when the systems reproduce discrimination?" The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers her something precious here: a shared ethical language. "Article 1 opens with a radical idea: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. The whole challenge, today, is to make sure that principle survives the technological transformation of our societies. Technology should serve dignity, not redefine its worth."

 

This is what makes the We Are Human Festival precious in her eyes: the chance to connect Paris, São Paulo, New York, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Quito and Geneva in a conversation that breaks out of the old relationship between center and periphery. She is especially keen for the festival to open a South-South dialogue, between Latin America and Africa, for instance, which share the same debates on cultural representation, access to technology and the preservation of local knowledge. Her advice to young creators who dream of carrying their voice abroad looks like her whole path: "Do not erase where you come from in order to exist internationally. The more specific and honest a story is, the greater its chance of becoming universal. Do not try to compete by imitating what is made elsewhere: create what could only have been created where you stand. That is what the world needs from Latin America." And for We Are Human, the conviction is the same. "I do not want Latin America simply to be invited into the future. I want it to help build it."