Pia Marais’ Transamazonia tries to connect us with its characters and the environments they inhabit, but we leave the film feeling much more attached to the latter. In this fourth feature from the South African-born and raised filmmaker (whose work, however, feels truly and appropriately transnational), she attempts to create an emotionally stirring story that speaks to sympathetic individual and collective groups—here, the indigenous Assurini people of Trocará, Brazil. But the film is actually more effective as a mood piece, with the thematic clash between empiricism and superstition rising like gunpowder smoke from the depths of the jungle setting.
Marais is appreciated at festivals but has been less successful in cinemas; her 2007 feature film The Unpolishedwhich won the main prize in Rotterdam, is one of the most underrated debuts of its decade. It is a tough and tender memoir of growing up with very unconventional parents, whose very personal view of a challenging, stimulating upbringing is reflected in TransamazoniaThe Movie’s plot begins after a plane crash in which a young girl, Rebecca (played as a teenager by Helena Zengel), is miraculously the only survivor. Her mother, a nurse, has died, leaving her in sole custody of her sleazy but oddly principled father, Lawrence (filmmaker, performance artist and occasional actor Jeremy Xido), who runs an evangelical mission attended largely by the indigenous population. Rebecca’s survival attracts the attention and fascination of the local media, and she is said to have healing powers that seem far-fetched, but the film is noticeably reluctant to debunk them.
Transamazonia is concerned with revealing the unique balance of cultures, belief systems (right down to extractive capitalism) and locals in Brazil, but it is also undeniably an outsider’s view, giving it a kinship with the old-fashioned but still powerful perspectives of Conrad’s colonial novels and Claire Denis. The crux of the matter comes when Alves (Rômulo Braga), a logging magnate, enlists Lawrence and Rebecca’s help to wake his wife from a coma; with a slight echo of Winter lighta task Lawrence certainly takes on happily, nurturing his ego as a self-proclaimed “shaman of the jungle” (his folk duets with Rebecca at the end of his sermons have something of Charles Manson about them). Rebecca herself, however, is exploring her origins – such as the reason her mother was in the country in the first place – and her awareness is heightened by her budding friendships with younger members of the Assurini tribe such as Silas (Hamã Luciano); Alves is involved in plundering the forest for his business and driving away the natives, but claims he will relent once his wife is healed.
It is literally in the title of the film: While this is derived from the Brazilian Transamazonica highway, which divides the northern and southern parts of the forest in half, Marais also sees her setting as a “zone” à la Tarkovsky’s Stalkersan enclave in a similarly disgusting green where miracles are sought and metaphysical wishes granted. But there is no travel scene: it is the entire reality of the film, perhaps that of Brazil, where charismatic religious leaders still have enormous influence and are allied with the contemporary extreme right responsible for the Bolsonaro era.
But as these connections show, Transamazonia succeeds best in triggering this discourse and forging these associations in our minds – a triangulation of church, country and capital that makes the characters they embody overly symbolic and almost hollow figures. Yet Zengel’s uncanny portrayal of a precocious child is convincing as she attempts to cross the threshold into adulthood and uncover her origins before she had to become the counterpart of a preacher and unwilling earthly proof of the divine.
Transamazonia Premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival 2024.
