In 2018, filmmakers João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora ushered Brazil’s indigenous Krahô people into the limelight with The Dead and the Others, a film which documents the traditions and beliefs of the much-endangered community (population: just under 3,000) through a teenager’s fictionalised struggle against his destined future as the shaman of his tribe. The Portuguese-Brazilian duo’s new collaboration could be considered a follow-up of sorts. Once again it’s set among the Krahô, and again it revolves around their defiance against an unwanted fate.
But the fight in the new film, which premiered in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard sidebar, is more expansive, its story much more epic in scale. Set against the backdrop of a real-life demonstration against then-Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to allow commercial mining companies and agrobusinesses to exploit long-protected tribal reservations, The Buriti Flower chronicles the different ways with which the Krahô have tried and tragically failed to resist state persecution across the ages – and how a young and emancipated generation seeks to triumph this time round.
Working even more closely with their Krahô hosts than before – two of their leading actors are credited as co-screenwriters, with one of them also serving as their production designer – Salaviza and Nader Messora have delivered a film that is at once an informative ethnological study, a gripping historical drama and a powerful political statement against the continuous erosion of the rights of Brazil’s long-beleaguered indigenous tribes.
A deft combination of affecting re-enactments of past atrocities, effective fictionalised representations of the Krahô’s current everyday lives and in-your-face footage of the real-life protests, The Buriti Flower is poised to blossom beyond the level of success attained by The Dead and the Others, which won a jury prize at the Un Certain Regard section five years ago before embarking on a successful international festival tour.
The film begins sometime in the past, where the Krahô are seen conducting a ritual to mark a birth among their own. The action then quickly shifts to a dark corner of the forest, where two children are shown stalking a menacing bull encroaching their lands; shaking off their hesitation and fear, they raise their bow and arrow in the hope of stopping this ominous and beastly intruder. It won’t be soon that we get to know how this is very much an allegory of sorts: the animal could be seen as a precursor of the cattle used by the white ruralistas to graze, dominate and decimate the Krahô’s ancestral forests.
After that prologue, the film cuts swiftly to the present, with one of those young fighters becoming Jotàt (Solane Tehtikwyj Krahô), a headstrong girl who is as unafraid to speak her mind (she demands a mattress so that she could sleep better – even if she’s never really seen one) or do the hard lifting for her family and community. While the adults (notably the men) become increasingly laxed in guarding the barriers around their reservation, Jotàt is at hand to lead her children’s platoon in patrolling the area to look out for “cup?s” (a derogatory term for urban interlopers hunting on their lands).
Jotàt’s might have inherited her fighting spirit from her mother Patpro (Ilda Patpro Krahô). A young mother raising her children alone while her husband is away – he’s a “supermarket hunter” now, she quips to her daughter – Patpro is energised by a new wave of social movements rising up against Bolsonaro’s near-genocidal policies towards indigenous peoples. Inspired by a speech by activist Sonia Guajarara (who later appears briefly in the film, before she became a real-life government minister earlier this year) and encouraged by her schoolteacher friend Debbie (Débora Sodré), she makes plans to travel to Brasilia to take part in a march in defence of indigenous land rights.
But she also has to contend with Jotàt’s condition at home, where the young girl reports being constantly haunted by visions and apparitions. Under the tutelage of Patpro’s shaman brother Hyjnõ (Francisco Hyjnõ Krahô), she and her daughter acquaint themselves gradually with the history of their tribe: the initial interactions with incoming white ranchers and the deadly violence that followed in the 1940s, the Krahô’s coerced enlistment into a militia formed by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, and the harsh realities the tribe faces in the present day.
Guided by Hyjnõ’s voiceover and also his conversations with his pregnant wife (Luzia Cruwakwyj Krahô), the viewer is slowly inducted through vividly choregraphed and ceaselessly ethereal representations of the Krahô’s tragic past. Presiding over the cinematography herself, the versatile Nader Messora is equally at ease grappling with these dreamy sequences as she is with the realist depiction of the Krahô’s seemingly mundane quotidian life and the documentary footage of both the tribe’s Kêtuwajê initiation rituals and, for the film’s grand finale, the massive inter-tribal political march in Brasilia in 2022.
Working with editor Edgar Feldman, Salaviza and Nader Messora manage to piece together a coherent account of the Krahô’s past and present stories which is very much accessible, even to those uninitiated in the socio-political history of the tribe and other indigenous peoples in Brazil. Much more at ease before the camera than they were in The Dead and the Others – the star of that film, Henrique Ihjac Krahô, has stayed on board as a co-screenwriter alongside Patpro and Hyjnõ – the indigenous actors delivered natural performances all round, with young Solane being the major breakout here.
But it’s not just the Krahô who have progressed in terms of negotiating their own presence in front of the camera. The filmmakers themselves have also apparently deepened their understanding about working with their indigenous hosts-collaborators, too. During one of his monologues, Hyjnõ recalls his own early interactions with white people who came and visited their reservation. Well-intentioned they might be, he says, but their guests then asked whether they could touch the Krahô, like some fantastical creatures from the wild.
It’s a caveat which seemed to have resonated greatly with Salaviza and Nader Messora, and a lesson these cosmopolitan filmmakers have indeed taken to heart. The Buriti Flower is neither a reductive, exotic tale about an untouched people, nor an exhibition of atrocities beset by stock sympathy. Instead, the film provides a complex account of an oppressed people taking note of their past to try and rewrite their present. Meanwhile, the film never stops short of being a wonderful sonic and visual feast, with its makers in full bloom.
Directors: João Salaviza, Renée Nader Messora
Screenwriters: João Salaviza, Renée Nader Messora, Ilda Patpro Krahô, Francisco Hyjnõ Krahô, Henrique Ihjac Krahô
Cast: Ilda Patpro Krahô, Francisco Hyjnõ Krahô
Producers: João Salaviza, Renée Nader Messora, Ricardo Alves Jr, Julia Alves
Cinematography: Renée Nader Messora
Editors: Edgar Feldman, João Salaviza, Renée Nader Messora
Production designers: Angeles Gacía Frinchaboy, Ilda Patpro Krahô
Sound designers: Lamar, Diogo Goltara
Production companies: Karô Filmes, Entre Filmes
World sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Krahô, Portuguese
123 minutes
