Luso-Brazilian film wins prize at Cannes parallel exhibition

“A Flor do Buriti” retraces the last eight decades of the Krahô people, from the north of Tocantins, and won the best team award at the “Um Certo Olhar” exhibition. Palme d’Or went to Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall”. Cannes.

The work won the prize for best team, distinguishing the directors and the Krahô people, from the north of Tocantins, who star in the film.

The two directors had already been awarded at Cannes in 2018, with the film Chuva É Cantoria na Aldeia dos Mortos, also shot in Krahô villages, which won the special jury prize at Cannes and moved the public by denouncing the indigenous genocide.

A Flor do Buriti was filmed over 15 months in four different Krahô villages. Through the testimonies of the indigenous people, they reconstruct the last eight decades — from the massacre suffered by the Krahô people in 1940 to the current difficulties, passing through the period of the military dictatorship.

indigenous resistance

In a note, the filmmakers recalled that, “in 1969, during the military dictatorship, the Brazilian State urged many of the survivors to join a military unit. Today, in the face of old and new threats, the Krahô continue to walk on their ‘blooded land’, reinventing the infinite forms of resistance on a daily basis”.

For the Cannes Film Festival, the film pays an “extraordinary tribute to the resilience of that indigenous people and the struggle for freedom”, while the French newspaper Le Monde highlighted the work’s “great poetic magic”.

The name of the film refers to the buriti flower, a type of wild palm tree that grows in Brazil and is found in the middle of the Krahô community.

At the film’s world premiere in Cannes, indigenous Brazilians and members of the film’s crew demonstrated on the red carpet for the land rights of Brazil’s native peoples.

Other winners

This year’s Cannes festival was marked by a record number of female directors, with seven of the 21 films in competition made by women, including newcomers and established auteurs.

The closing ceremony was held this Saturday (27/03), and the Palme d’Or went to the film Anatomy of a Fall, by French Justine Triet, the third female director to win the festival’s main award.

The film’s lead actress is German Sandra Hüller, who plays a writer who tries to prove her innocence after being accused of killing her husband.

In the category of best actress, Merve Dizdar, from Turkey, was awarded for her performance in the film About Dry Grasses, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

The best actor award went to Japanese Koji Yakusho for Perfect Days, a film by German director Wim Wenders about the story of a toilet cleaner in Tokyo.

The main prize of the show “An Other Look” went to How to Have Sex, by London-based director Molly Manning Walker.

bl (Lusa, AP)