Here is a complex, mysterious docufictional mediation which unfolds at an unhurried walking pace, co-authored by the Indigenous Brazilian film-maker Ariel Kuaray Ortega, a member of the Mbyá-Guarani movie collective; it’s evidently been a personal project, many years in the making, and a prizewinner at the 2023 IDFA festival in Amsterdam. Ortega returns to his home town in a remote forested region on the border with Argentina, on a mission to investigate a local legend that a man called Canuto, from his grandfather’s generation, was transformed into a jaguar.
The film is at once a documentary on this subject and a record of the fictional re-enactment that Ortega is staging using local people – and, in a way, it is a film about itself. He speaks to his aged grandfather and to villagers about their customs and beliefs and their fraught relationship with the military tyranny of the time; it was a period notorious for the desaparecidos – the “disappeared” – which provides an enigmatic political context for Canuto’s vanishing and the authorities who appropriated their lands without compensation. There are also sharp comments on a certain high-handed “white architect” who designed an award-winning wooden community centre for them, which the community itself regards as exasperatingly flimsy and unfit for purpose, and which they plan to break up for lumber.
The film works in a kind of real-time immersive way, showing scenes in the community at unbroken length . So: does anyone appearing on camera fully believe that Canuto was transformed into a jaguar? Or is the whole idea mysticalised and relativised to such an extent that we question our assumptions about every aspect of asking that question? It could be that Canuto met a horrible end, political or otherwise, and the “jaguar” myth was devised by the collective hivemind to process their shock and grief. It’s an intriguing study.
