The passage from ethnographic cinema on the indigenous people of Mexico to Indigenous People’s Cinema began during the 1980’s. This article presents a retrospective view of some of the first efforts to achieve a transformation that implied not only theoretical, but also methodological and practical changes. The direct participation of members of the indigenous communities in which we worked, during the different stages of cinema production was a key element for this transformation. We describe the rupture with the ways of ethnographic cinema discussing several productions that were made in the middle eighties in what was then called the Audiovisual Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenist Institute (AEA-INI, for its Spanish initials).