The flight of the condor: a letter, a song and the story of intangible cultural heritage

The use of audiovisual supports for scholarly production in critical heritage studies is not a usual occurrence, neither is the production of documentaries on intangible heritage focused less on aesthetics and more on issues of transnational politics and bureaucracies. The film, The Flight of the Condor, directed by Valdimar Hafstein and Áslaug Einarsdóttir, is a welcomed exception to this trend. This open-access video, issued in 2018, was produced as a complement to Hafstein’s book, Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories from UNESCO (Hafstein 2018), and is built around its second chapter, ‘Making threats: the condor’s flight’. Hafstein, professor of folkloristics and ethnology at the University of Iceland, is a renowned scholar in the fields of folklore and critical heritage studies; his scholarship is influential in the work of many emerging academics, including my own. Thus, it was a pleasant surprise to see an open-access documentary accompanying the author’s book, addressing some critical reflections of this work while engaging with a musical piece so intimately connected with my home country.