2008
Aka La terra degli uomini rossi – Birdwatchers
Original running time: 108 mins
Italy / Brazil
Produced by Amedeo Pagani, Marco Bechis and Fabiano Gullane for Classic, RAI Cinema, KArta Film and GUllane Filmes
Director: Marco Bechis
Story: Marco Bechis
Screenplay: Marco Bechis, Luiz Bolognesi, Lara Fremder
Cinematography: Helcio Alemao Nagamine
Music: Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726).
Editor: Jacopo Quadri
Art director: Caterina Giargia, Clovis Bueno
Cast: Abrisio Da Silva Pedro (Osvaldo), Alicelia Batista Cabreira (Lia), Ademilson Concianza Verga (Ireneu), Ambrosio Vilhalva (Nadio), Claudio Santamaria (the guard), Mateus Nachtergaele (Dimas), Fabiane Pereira Da Silva (Maria), Chiara Caselli (the farmer’s wife), Leonardo Medeiros (the farmer), Nelson Concianza (Sciamano), Poli Fernandez Souza (Tito), Eliane Juca Da Silva (Mami), Inéia Arce Gonçalves (maid)
Despite picking up a handful of awards, including a special award at the Golden Globes and a Golden Lion nomination at Venice, Birdwatchers only had a limited release in the UK and US, playing more on the art-house circuit than to popular audiences. Which is a shame, because it’s a good film, moving and intelligent, and its broadly environmental subject matter should have made it chime with a a wider audience than just the cultural cognoscenti. Perhaps the problem was its very commitment, its almost total lack of of irony, not to mention its broadly downbeat, fatalistic tone (albeit with a rare moment of optimism at the very end).
The Guarani, an tribe of Brazilian Indians, have been forced to move from their Amazonian home to a reservation; their ancestral lands now converted to agricultural farmland and managed by wealthy ranchers. Driven to posing as ‘primitives’ to foolish tourists for cash, experiencing an uneasy relationship with their new neighbours and suffering from endemic depression, which becomes apparent with the suicide of two young girls, they decide to reclaim their old homeland, occupying land – essentially a lay-by next to a highway – belonging to a local farmer, Moreira (Leonardo Medeiros).
Tensions soon escalate: unable to afford food and with little left in the forests to hunt, they kill and eat one of Moreira’s cows; Osvaldo (Pedro Abrísio da Silva), a trainee shaman, begins a relationship with Moreira’s daughter; and when cattle start mysteriously dying, the ranch-hands blame it on an Indian curse. Anxious to remove the squatters, Moreira’s wife (Chiara Caselli) tries to pay them to leave and, when that fails, her husband resorts to more underhand methods, spraying their camp with pesticides as a starter. It’s all destined to end in violence…
An Italo-Brazilian co-production directed by a Argentinian exile of Chilean and Italian origin, Birdwatchers is a modern day jungle movie without the cheap thrills – the cannibalism, gore and animal slaughter – and with a heavy social conscience in its stead. It’s not a fast moving film, by any means, but it has a slow, deliberate pace that draws in the audience, and the story is never less than involving. Furthermore, it’s beautifully filmed by cinematographer Hélcio Alemão Nagamine, who manages to infuse even the most squalid of settings with a rich array of colours, most particularly the russet tones of the earth and the verdant vegetation.
Its prime concern is, naturally, the contradiction between the old and the new, between the traditional Amazonian lifestyle and the new westernised existence in which the tribe are now forced to live. The tensions exist not only in the relationship that the they have with the newcomers – and by newcomers we’re talking about people who have lived and farmed their land for three generations – but also within the Guarani themselves: they simultaneously cling to their old traditions but embrace the ephemera of the present day, the mobile phones, trainers and facile pop music. Beyond this, though, there are also elements of the revisionist western about it, and occasional suggestions of mysticism, of something else residing among the jungle that’s only perceptible to those truly in tune with the natural landscape.
Marco Bechis is a new name to me, but he’s been around for a few years, generally directing Italian co-productions set in South America, and won several awards for films such as Garage Olimpo (99) and Sons and Daughters (2001). One of his great achievements here is to coax quite wonderful performances from the non-professional Indians in the cast, and he’s also clever enough to allow the characters a degree of ambiguity: the Indians are hardly idealised innocents (their leader, Nadio, for instance, is a hopeless drunk) and the westerners are far from cartoon villains. A moving, timely film.
