2024-10-01 03:01:00
Within a careful and high-quality programming (see separate), There is a movie that stands out in the 12th edition of the Buenos Aires International Documentary Film Festival (FIDBA). Not only because of its cinematographic virtues or its urgent theme, but also because of the name of one of its directors. It is about The Fall of the Sky (The fall from the sky), latest work of Brazilian filmmaker Eryk Rocha, co-directed with his compatriot Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha: an exploration through yanomami culture, one of the many silenced native peoples that are part of that subcontinent that represents Brazil in South America.
The film portrays them comprehensively, observing their daily lives, recording the difficulties they go through in their relationship with the Western culture that governs the country and, above all, trying understand its cosmogony. In it, dream and reality intertwine to forge a link with the world, which in appearance is almost opposite to what those who inhabit the urban environment know.
Owner of a lucid and precise cinematographic vision, Eryk Rocha is also the son of the notable filmmaker Glauber Rocha, founder of Cinema Novo in the ’60s and one of the key names of Latin American social cinema. The connections between Glauber’s cinema and Eryk’s are evident, but not obvious. There is something in the son’s gaze, in the way in which his film with Da Cunha tries to show an alien universe, which undoubtedly dialogues with the father’s work, always attentive to the less visible spaces of society. The Fall of the Sky is projected this Tuesday at 9 p.m. in the Sala Caras y Caretas, Sarmiento 2037, after the FIDBA opening ceremony.
-Your filmography includes more thane ten feature films that in his Most of them portray issues linked to urban life. ¿A Skyfall It is your first approach tol Rural and jungle Brazil?
Eric Rocha: -No, my previous movie, Ednain which Gabriela was a screenwriter, was also filmed on the border between the states of Pará and Tocantins. That was our first experience in the Brazilian Amazon.
–And why did you decide to portray that other part of the reality of your country?
E. R.: -We wanted to show the struggle and the Yanomami culture, but also the culture of destruction and exploitation that prevails among what Davi Kopenawa, the tribal leader of the Yanomami, aptly calls the “Village of Merchandise”. It is these visions of the world, of the image and of cinema that are debated. Davi is perfectly capable of naming the people who want to steal the Yanomami jungle and the traces that these people and their economic system have left on the land. Our wish is that the Yanomami culture is seen as a living, contemporary and flourishing culture, but also that the culture cheesecloth (non-indigenous and white) see themselves from a shamanic perspective and an anti-colonial geopolitics.
–The Fall of the Sky It is based on a book written by Daviwho in the film acts more as a narrator than as a protagonist. What is it that les attracted of the book for aList it whose?
Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha: -The desire to make the film arose from the book and the relationship we had with it. It is a beautiful book that gives rise to not one, but many movies. However, we never thought of adapting it, because it is huge and unadaptable. It is rather about a new cinematic chapter of the book. The Yanomami cosmogony is very audiovisual. We focus on the third part of the book, where Davi turns the mirror on ourselves, the cheeseclothto tell us who we are from their perspective, which is that of the Yanomami and that of the spirits of the Brazilian Amazon jungle.
-What were the main challenges you faced? esa relection cinematographica and in what ways did they solve?
E. R.: -The film is the cinematographic expression of the enchantment we felt when reading the book, of course, but above all of what we have experienced in the flesh, blood and spirit throughout the last seven years of relationship with Davi and the Yanomami. So the script we wrote served more as study base that as something to follow during filming. Once there, we felt much more driven by the Yanomami and provoked by the aesthetic language of those ceremonies in which we participated, which largely involved a challenge to expand our understanding of cinema. It is a film in which the camera not only looks at the Yanomami, but also at us, the non-indigenous.
-In that same sense, do you as filmmakers they believe that the inclusion and integration of these peoples Is it a viable process?
E. R.: -Look, this movie was shot with a hybrid equipment of indigenous and non-indigenous people, very small. The camera enters into this relationship, just like the body, eyes and ears. It is not about keeping something immutable and distant, but about changing along with what affects you. In this sense, our meeting and relationship with Davi and the Yanomami people occurred as a confluence between cinemas: the cinema of the camera, the microphone and the montage; and the cinema of theatricality and ritual. Both in a mutual effort to meet, provoke, tense, intersect and create images and sounds that would hold the sky on the verge of collapsing.
G. C. D. C.: -It all started with a co-production between our production company and the Hutukara Yanomami Association. We spent years working on preparing the film and forming that hybrid team. We trained young Yanomami directors, such as Morzaniel Ɨramari, Aida Harika, Roseane Yariana and Edmar Tokorino, who worked during filming and also made their own short films, which have already been screened at various film and art festivals in Brazil and around the world .
-Based on experiences like this, do you think it is impossible to propose negotiation between peoples like the Yanomami and “white” Brazil outside of the idea of a war, a word that appears repeatedly in Davi’s speech?
G. C. D. C.: -In Brazil we have an indigenous woman from the Xakriabá people, Célia Xakriabá, who says something very nice about it: “We are the ones who insist on the party knowing that we are at war.” War and celebration are the fight, and it seems to us that there is still a lot of fight ahead. A fight that never ends because white people insist on not listening, on not dreaming. Or dreaming only of themselves, of their project to inhabit the Earth. Yanomami territory was demarcated in the 1990s, after much fighting, and this does not mean that their land is not still invaded. Today they are experiencing one of the worst health and humanitarian crises in their history, caused by a new agent called narcogarimpo. So it is very difficult to think “outside of war.” We need immediate state action to remove invaders from indigenous land and a radical change in government policies.
-And do you think that cinema is a useful tool to mediate or provide solutions to this type of social conflicts?
E. R.: -On a continent so torn and in permanent social upheaval like ours, and in a world where advertising and hegemonic languages increasingly standardize and guide certain types of monoculture of communication and imaginaries, We feel freer to seek other paths and alliances. And I believe that documentary film, due to its lightness of structure and budget, is bearing witness to this Brazil and this complex Latin America in flames of the 21st century. Need relaunch ourselves in the heart of our time and reactivate risk, rethink the social space and how cinema can be inserted there.
G. C. D. C.: -Our search involved seeing, hearing and popping on the screen the dream and struggle of the Yanomami people. And at the same time, explode this trajectory of a cinema that we believe navigates the unknown, that moves between materiality and spirit. Davi often speaks of his words being “an arrow into the hearts of those.” cheesecloth”. The film brings these words in Davi’s voice, it brings the bodies and the songs, and also questions that are specific to our time and that urgently need to be answered.