Crowrã

If João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora’s CHUVA É CANTORIA NA ALDEIA DOS MORTOS suspended the boundaries between tradition and modernity, wakefulness and sleep, nature and civilisation, the duo’s latest film gently smudges the lines that divide past from present and fiction from documentary to ambitious, dizzying efect. Once again, the villages of the Krahô people form the central setting, where Patpro is planning her trip to Brasília to attend a large-scale demonstration for Indigenous rights, a necessary act given the tensions imposed from outside that are felt even in this remote location: her uncle Hỳjnõ apprehends poachers at the perimeter of their lands, while her daughter Jotàt slips into historical traumas in her sleep. Yet these narrative elements are thoroughly imbricated with the film’s intuitive, immersive observation of everyday life, captured on 16mm brimming with light and colour. Here everything overlaps, always in balance; a dream can fold back onto a ritual or a massacre, a monologue can make memory flesh, flora and fauna can come to the foreground at any time and a rally can be precisely as real as it needs to be. How can collective history not take its inspiration from everything? (James Lattimer)

João Salaviza: DUAS PESSOAS (2004, K), ARENA (2009, K), HOTEL MÜLLER (2010, K), CASA NA COMPORTA (2011, K), CERRO NEGRO (2012, K), MONTANHA (AM ENDE DER KINDHEIT, 2015), HIGH CITIES OF BONE (2017), RUSSA (2018, K), CHUVA É CANTORIA NA ALDEIA DOS MORTOS (2018)