There is a sense of grand hallucination and staged spectacle to Transamazonia, the majestic, glossy fourth feature of South African director Pia Marais, which is set deep in the Amazon rainforest. As with her prior thriller Layla Fourie (2013), about a polygraphist caught up in political unrest, Transamazonia focuses on a woman who must re-examine her own moral stance and family loyalties amid brutal racial injustice. In this case, it’s a young, blonde-haired European who is revered as a faith healer, propping up the work of her father, an evangelist missionary, with her fame. Her role stirs inner conflict, now that she’s reached an age where she is questioning her origins and identity, and the power that she has to influence an escalating conflict between Indigenous locals and intruders logging their land. Sumptuous packaging and the topical interrogation of colonialism, environmental plunder and activist methods, albeit through broad, somewhat heavy-handed ciphers, should attract wider release prospects for this atmospheric thriller, which premiered in the international competition of the Locarno Film Festival.
Rebecca (played with wilful intensity by German actress Helena Zengel) found herself in the Amazon after surviving a plane crash as a child, in which her mother died. An Indigenous man out hunting carried her to safety, after chancing upon the wreckage. The film opens with a scene of the crash aftermath. The catastrophe is frozen still amid the verdant and light-flooded lushness of the jungle like Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”, or some other Romantic oil painting of lives blown off course by gruesome circumstances. A giant ant scuttles down a white, lifeless arm, which lies alien-like amid the cacophony of chirping birds, insects and dripping water. It’s an image that often replayed in the troubled dreams of Rebecca as she grew up, and continues to haunt her. Whether a flashback or a dream, the scene is imprinted with the vivid surrealism of traumatic shock.
Now on the cusp of adulthood, Rebecca is well-practiced in waxing lyrical about her ordeal through a microphone on stage to the Indigenous crowds who come to the mission. She stirs them into an ecstatic state with her claims of having been chosen by God, her survival a miracle. Her father Lawrence Byrne (Jeremy Xido, balancing earnestness with entitled arrogance) has trained her effectively in zeal as a vocation, and they sing emotional folk duets together as a well-oiled double act. But his paternalist sanctimony drives a widening wedge between them, as he takes it upon himself to preach non-retaliatory action to members of the local Iriarte tribe, who resort to equipment sabotage and blocking the road as acts of resistance against the ongoing logging of their land by the owner of a sawmill. Rebecca feels further alienated by the potential threat of a rival for her father’s attention as Lawrence turns his insistent and persuasive charms toward Denise (Sabine Timoteo), a woman who it emerges may have worked with her mother at a hospice. New questions are raised, in the process, about Rebecca’s origins.
In true colonialist fashion, the missionaries are unsure of their roots, but confident of their dominion. The Indigenous populace know their way around the rainforest where their ancestors have long belonged, but this only increases the antagonism of the sawmill’s men who, bearing chainsaws and firearms, violently endanger their existence, viewing them as a mere obstacle to their corporate interests. Rebecca’s sympathies align increasingly with the protesters, especially after one of them, Jilvan (Iwinaiwa Assurini) is brought, wounded, to recuperate in their home. When Rebecca is called on to work a miracle in exchange for the Iriarte’s freedom, it is a potent symbol of the currency of white European power, over the territory’s dispossessed.
Transamazonia settles more squarely into conventional thriller suspense as it builds toward its downbeat end, the mood aided by a quietly ominous electronic score by Lim Giong, and atmospheric lensing of the forest by D.O.P. Mathieu de Montgrand in greens and blues that shimmer and shine, or deepen into gloom.
Director: Pia Marais
Screenwriters: Pia Marais, Willem Droste
Cinematographer: Mathieu de Montgrand
Cast: Helena Zengel, Jeremy Xido, Sabine Timoteo, Hamã Luciano, Iwinaiwa Assurini
Producers: Sophie Erbs, Tom Dercourt, Pierrick Baudouin, Murielle Thierrin, Claudia Steffen, Christoph Friedel, Jean-Marc Fröhle , Stefano Centini, Chuti Chang, Camilo Cavalcanti, Viviane Mendonça, Jorane Castro, Pia Marais, Alex C. Lo, Guilherme Cezar Coelho, Fernando Loureiro
Editing: Matthieu Laclau, Yann-Shan Tsai
Sound: Dana Farzanehpour, Andreas Hildebrandt, Frank Cheng
Music: Lim Giong
Production Design: Petra Barchi
Production companies: Cinéma Defacto (France), Gaijin (France), Alabra Films (France), Pandora Film Produktion (Germany), Point Productions (Switzerland), Volos Films (Taiwan), O Par (Brazil), Cabocla Filmes (Brazil), Tigresa & Matizar Filmes (Brazil), Moonduckling Films, Jazzy Pictures
Sales: The Party Film Sales
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In Portuguese and English
112 minutes
