The Cannes festival hosted this Tuesday the premiere of “Crowra”, a filmed chronicle of the life of the krahô and a vindication of the role of the indigenous peoples of Brazil.
The two directors, the Portuguese João Salaviza and the Brazilian Renée Nader Messora, document the past, the present and future challenges of this town, located in the Cerrado of Brazil, a vast region of tropical savannah.
“What we are looking for is to translate the sensitivity, the poetry, the beauty of the krahô and put it in images, in sound, in montage,” said Salaviza in an interview with AFP.
“It is not an activist cinema but it is a deeply political cinema”, assures the co-director of this film, halfway between documentary and fiction and in which the krahô recreate their own lives.
Their survival is at stake in the Cerrado, an area of great biodiversity under pressure from agribusiness and a hostile government during the presidency of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), in power when the film was shot.
“Crowra”, a co-production between Brazil and Portugal, is the result of fifteen months of filming and coexistence of the filmmakers in four different villages of this indigenous land, a region that both know thoroughly and where they have lived for years.
awareness
“We knew more or less what we wanted to tell but we had no idea how we were going to achieve it and this was built with them,” says Nader Messora, who calls for a “very open” cinema in collaboration with its protagonists.
The film, presented in the parallel section Un Certain Regard, also evokes the distancing of the Krahô from their traditions, from a father who exchanges hunting for the supermarket to the renunciation of men to go naked in traditional celebrations.
“Not that there’s exactly a loss [cultural]I think there is a reconfiguration (…) They take advantage of what works for them and throw out a lot of what does not work for them from the novelties that non-indigenous people bring”, called ‘cûpe’ in their language, notes Renée Nader Messora.
“Crowra” also shows the political awareness of the krahô, when some of them decide to travel to Brasilia for a great mobilization of the indigenous peoples against the Bolsonaro government.
“They understood that there are many battle fronts and one of them is learning to occupy the spaces of power,” says Salaviza, who describes the arrival of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the Brazilian presidency this year as “a world change.”
The film follows various characters, such as Jotàt, a girl inhabited by the ghosts of her ancestors who remind her of a massacre that occurred in the 1940s.
Meanwhile, Hyjnõ, the guardian of the village, fights to prevent illegal raids by the ‘cûpe’ who steal parrots on his land and then sell them in the city.
The film also features the participation of Sonia Guajajara, head of the new Ministry of Original Peoples, “a focus of hope” according to Salaviza, who does not hesitate to describe the years of Bolsonaro’s presidency as a “regime”.
The two filmmakers presented their first film “The Dead and the Others” in Cannes in 2018, which already dealt with the Krahô community and won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes.
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