Sara Flores Film Opens DOC NYC on November 11

By Elena Vasquez

The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs (2026) opens DOC NYC on Wednesday, November 11, giving Sara Flores — the artist representing the Peruvian pavilion at the current Venice Biennale — her first major documentary portrait.

The film, directed by Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi, screens first at the 50th annual São Paulo International Film Festival starting October 19. After its DOC NYC opening night, it streams online as part of the festival from November 12 to 29. That gives viewers an 18-day window to watch from home.

Who is Sara Flores?

Flores is a Shipibo artist working within the Amazonian tradition her community has sustained for generations. The documentary's opening sequence shows her process from raw material to finished pattern. She strips bark from a tree. She boils it slowly, a small tamarin monkey curled on her head like a crown. She dips a blade into a bowl of tree juice and free-hands a series of geometric shapes. Her nails are stained with age and ink. Her grip, the filmmakers emphasize, remains remarkably steady.

The film positions her craft as something concrete rather than exotic: a material practice built on bark, pigment, blade and hand. Takeaway: the patterns begin as tree juice, applied free-hand, with no stencil and no sketch.

What does the film show about her rise?

After the Amazon-set opening, the film jumps to a first-class flight to New York. Flores smiles at a flute of champagne. At her exhibition at the now-defunct Clearing gallery on the Bowery, she stands in a crimson blouse, admiring the admirers. In Central Park, she feeds the pigeons after watching a man extend acorns to the squirrels.

The documentary follows her rapid ascendance to art world fame, culminating in her role as the representing artist of the Peruvian pavilion at the current Venice Biennale — the platform that placed her before an international audience. The contrast is the film's spine: a canoe and insect hum on one side, champagne and gallery crowds on the other, with Flores moving between both.

Why does the timing matter?

DOC NYC, now in its fall season, chose the film as its opening night selection — a slot that typically signals a documentary with festival traction ahead. The São Paulo screening two weeks earlier gives the film its world platform first, on October 19.

Venice gives Flores one measure of standing; two festival selections within a single autumn give another. For a film about an artist whose materials come directly from the rainforest, the question it frames — what the world stands to lose — now travels through exactly the art world circuits the documentary depicts.

The film's US streaming run from November 12 to 29 will determine how far beyond the festival halls that question reaches.