There are documentaries that inform, and then there are documentaries that listen. The work of Ana María Ovalle Muskus belongs firmly to the latter. Her films do not arrive with spectacle or forced conclusions. Instead, they move carefully, observantly, allowing people, language, memory, and silence to reveal themselves on their own terms.

Originally from Colombia and now based in the UK, Ana María works at the intersection of documentary filmmaking, communications, and social impact storytelling. Through her platform Del Alma (“from the soul”), she has spent years collaborating with Indigenous and rural communities, using film not simply as a medium for visibility, but as an act of preservation, respect, and care.

One of her most recent projects, Dear Dalyana, explores the urgent reality of Indigenous languages disappearing across generations. Centered around three women from the Wayuu community in Colombia, grandmother, mother, and daughter, the documentary quietly reveals how language can vanish within a single family line. The grandmother speaks Wayuunaiki. The mother speaks both Spanish and Wayuunaiki. The daughter speaks only Spanish.

In just three generations, an entire linguistic inheritance begins to fade.

But what makes Ana María’s process especially compelling is not only the emotional depth of the story itself, but the immense creative and ethical labour behind it. During our conversation, she spoke candidly about filming over twelve hours a day in rural Colombia, working with footage that was mostly in a language she was still learning, and navigating the responsibility of telling a story that was not hers to control. There’s a moment during our conversation with Ana María Ovalle Muskus where she says something that quietly unlocks the spirit of her entire practice.

“I didn’t want to play the role of this non-Indigenous person twisting narratives that are not mine,” she explains. “With all my respect and love, I was just like a fly on the wall. I was just observing.”

That decision shaped everything about the documentary’s visual language. The film was shot entirely handheld, creating an intimacy that feels immediate and deeply human. Ana María described mapping the rhythm of the documentary through drawings and abstract visual diagrams long before the final edit existed. She sketched emotional waves, family dynamics, daily routines, and visual motifs almost like a cartographer trying to trace feeling itself.

In a media landscape where stories are often extracted, packaged, dramatised, and sometimes flattened for consumption, Ana María approaches filmmaking differently. Her work does not force itself into the centre of the story. It listens first and moves carefully, with the understanding that documenting people, especially communities historically spoken over or misrepresented, requires more than technical skill or artistic vision. It requires humility.

Through years of working alongside Indigenous and rural communities in Colombia, Ana Maria has built not just professional relationships, but deeply personal ones. What began as social and environmental project work evolved into something much more intimate: trust, friendship, and shared purpose.

“I feel one of my purposes is being of service to Indigenous communities,” she tells us. “To put my talent, my energy, and my willingness at the service of these stories.”

What makes Dear Dalyana so affecting is that it refuses spectacle. The film does not shout its message. Instead, it trusts the emotional weight of ordinary moments. Family conversations. School routines. Shared silences. Daily rituals. The gradual slipping away of language unfolds almost invisibly, which is precisely what makes it devastating.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the final 20-minute documentary is the immense creative process and emotional labour hidden beneath it.

Ana María spent between two and three weeks filming in the countryside, often recording from 6am to 6pm to make use of daylight. The observational approach she committed to meant she captured everything as it unfolded naturally. No heavy intervention. No forced performances. Just life happening in front of the lens.

Then came the editing process. Or, more accurately, the mountain. “Eighty percent of the footage was in Indigenous language that I’m still learning,” she explains. “I knew what was happening emotionally, but I didn’t have the exact translation.”

With weeks of footage, much of it spoken in Wayuunaiki, Ana María had to invent a system to navigate the sheer scale of material. She created a colour-coded “traffic light” spreadsheet to categorise clips by emotional resonance, technical quality, and narrative importance. Green clips were essential. Yellow clips contained fragments worth saving. Red clips were discarded entirely. Alongside this, she worked closely with Marinella, one of the documentary’s protagonists and co-producers, who painstakingly translated scenes from Wayuunaiki into Spanish to ensure the story remained truthful and collaborative at every stage.

Even subtitling became an unexpected challenge.

“When audiences don’t speak Spanish,” she explains, “they can’t tell when the conversation shifts between Spanish and Indigenous language. To them, it all sounds foreign. So I had to create another visual code to help people understand what language was being spoken.”

It’s this level of thoughtfulness that runs through Ana María’s work. Every creative choice carries both artistic intention and ethical consideration. Every frame asks not only how should this story be told? but also who has the right to tell it, and how do you do so responsibly?

Before even assembling the documentary itself, Ana María began visualising rhythm. Not through timelines or shot lists, but through drawings. Waves. Shapes. Emotional maps. She attended an artistic workshop where abstract ideas were translated into sketches, and she began drawing the documentary almost like sheet music.

“I remember drawing the rhythm of the documentary in waves,” she recalls. “I was mapping the places, the events happening during the school break, the types of shots I wanted, the emotional feeling.”

The documentary was always intended to feel intimate and immediate, so she committed to shooting entirely handheld.

“Hundred percent handheld,” she says. “Because I wanted it to feel very real and personal.”

As filming progressed, she organised scenes visually and emotionally, constantly tracking relationships between moments, locations, and themes. Then came the painstaking process of reviewing every clip. To survive the overwhelming amount of footage, Ana María created what she calls a “traffic light system.”

Outside filmmaking, Ana María’s journey also reflects the often unseen realities many artists navigate behind the scenes. Since moving to London in 2023 to pursue a Master’s degree in Documentary Film, she has balanced her creative ambitions, while continuing to work remotely in communications for a Colombian NGO. She has brought her 13+ years of professional experience in communications, impact storytelling and documentary filmmaking into the UK, to work with to NGOs, B-Corps and social impact organisations.

For Ana María, storytelling is not simply about cinema. It is about connection. It is about safeguarding memory before it disappears. It is about using creativity in service of people, culture, and community. In a world increasingly saturated with disposable content, her work insists on slowness, listening, and emotional truth.

“There are a lot of beautiful stories out there that are worth sharing,” she says. “And I believe humanity is becoming more open to these kinds of stories.”

With projects like Dear Dalyana, she is helping ensure those stories, and the languages inside them, are not lost to silence.