director’s notes
The arrival of the guaranì-kaiowà on the cinema screens: a cinematographic struggle.
This film is dedicated to the memory of Enrique Ahriman, my friend and mentor, who died in 2002 in Buenos Aires. We talked a lot about our projects. Enrique was a multi-faceted artist but we, his friends, were the works he really cared for. He was always thinking and he thought more about what we had in mind than about his numerous personal works. While he was slowly passing away, we talked a lot about the great genocide of human history, the American Conquest. I was interested in the “problem of the other” which Todorov had thoroughly analyzed in a book of the same title. He suggested me to read Yanoama (video), the story-interview to Helena Valero, a woman who was kidnapped and held secluded for thirty years, a sort of female Tarzan.
The following year, I made a long trip on the Andean cordillera, among the Indian communities living in Peru and Ecuador. Then I went as far as the Equatorial Amazonia in a small plane with a group of birdwatchers, visiting the Ashuar tribe who met the white man for the first time only forty years ago. When I came back to Milan, I wrote a screenplay on Helena Valero’s story straight away and I prepared a trip of location scouting.
I had been following for years the Survival campaigns for the defence of Indian populations. I visited their offices in London and Milan. I gathered information on the tribes still surviving in Latin America and I discovered extremeley rare videos on Indians who had just been discovered. Then I learnt about the suicides among the young guaranì-kaiowà in Mato Grosso do Sul and of the fights for the reoccupation of their lands, the retomadas. I understood immediately that guaranì-kaiowà were the people I had wanted to know for a long time, although I had never heard about them. But I also knew that I couldn’t use the screenplay I had written on Helena Valero. And I changed my travel plans, not to Amazonia any longer. I put a 35 mm camera, a notebook, a tape-recorder in my bag and I left with Caterina Giargia (art director and costume designer) for Dourados, one of the main cities of the area, both modern and rich, the centre for the production of the transgenic soya labelled “Monsanto”. The town seemed the perfect set for David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”. At the bus station, Nereu Schneider, a lawyer, who has taken care of the defence of the guaranì-kaiowà for twenty years, was waiting for us. Nereu introduced us to the Indian communities of the region and the first one we visited was Ambrosio’s, who later became the protagonist of the film (Nadio). His degraded life story in the Carapò reserve, the occupation of a fazenda built about sixty years before on the native lands, the daily fights with the fazenderos, were events which left a mark on the screenplay which I was beginning to write. Ambrosio’s was an exemplary story. Five hundred years after the conquest, the conflict was the same as then. The modes had changed, not the substance. The film I wanted to make hovered above those places, but the question was “how” to do the film, using which film language, which devices. I knew that the main problem was choosing the actors who would play those roles, but which professional actors could do it? I found the answer to this question one afternoon, after a meeting with the government authorities: those native men and women that I was watching while they loudly explained their reasons to Brasilia’s authorities, were gifted with a sophisticated art of rhetoric, they knew how to speak convincingly, with a great control over their words and body. They were actors. From then on, I always knew with absolute certainty that the film would be made only if I managed to make of those natives the protagonists of the film. Without them, the film would be meaningless.
In order to confirm that first intuition, I asked a young native called Osvaldo, of Ambrosio’s community, if he was interested in acting in a film. He asked me what being actor in a film meant and I answered that to be an actor meant playing a role, that he had to learn how to act. He thought about it for a while and then replied: “But I play a role every day”, “When?” I asked with surprise. “Every day, when I pray”. Their rituals are “theatrical” performances, events and conversations with Nhanderu, their God. Acting is part of their ancient tradition.
We started the actual preparation of the film only at the end of 2006 and we started the actors selection. We needed about 230, between main roles, supporting roles and extras. Urbano Palacio, who has a great konwledge of the guaranì language, travelled round the Indian communities of Mato Grosso do Sul interviewing 800 natives. Then we concentrated on three large communities in the sorroundings of Dourados. We had to keep to the communities near the city because we didn’t want to uproot the actors from their families for long periods. During the shooting the natives were driven on the set every morning and went back to their communities every night.
Then we examined all the interviewees, one by one, taking decisions on various levels: apart from the expressive potentialities, we had problems which simply don’t exist in a conventional casting: we wanted to know before starting shooting if the Indians we had chosen would get to the bottom of their engagement. Our great fear was that our work with the Indians could get interrupted. Everybody repeated that I wouldn’t get to the end of the film, that they would leave me half way, that they would protest and strike as they did with Herzog’s Aguirre the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo or with Joffé’s The Mission. But they were unfounded worries: all the Indians we chose continued their work until the end of shooting.
In The Mission, the Waunana Colombian natives who played in the film the role of the Guarani, were always and only background figures beside the principal characters played by Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons. In my film, I wanted to reverse this cliché giving the Indians the role of protagonists and keeping the professional white actors in the background.
Once the first selection was over, we had about a hundred Indians ready to do the film. I wanted to set them to work before deciding who would play the main roles. I met Luiz Mario, a theatre director who supported me in the preparation work. He had never gone through such an experience as the one I proposed to him. We didn’t have to impose classical acting exercises and techniques which we were conscious would break their spontaneity and their originality. We had to start form their cultural and material universe. And we had to keep in mind that they already had a huge “acting” ability: diction, gait, gestures, acting, were all techniques which would make them stiff. So we decided with Luiz Mario to prepare their body, their voice, working on the their gestural culture and their tonal scale. We started a series of “theatrical seminars” with the Indians.
After the first months of work, I watched the first improvisations on video and I realized that something was still not working: the Indians always talked as much as possible, as if silence was prohibited, as if words were the only means of “performing” in the scene they improvised. I thought about their oral tradition, but also about television, which many of them watch. I realized then that they needed to know more about how cinema works, nobody had taught them that as yet. In a make-shift projection room I showed them two sequences with almost no dialogue (The Birds by
Hitchcock; Once Upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone).
I screened the scenes in three different ways: the sequence as in the original, the same sequence interrupted by two seconds of soundless black screen at each cut, and a third version of the same scene without any sound. I then showed them what happened at each cut, as every scene was composed by many pieces, and all the pieces were the frames we were about to shoot. The interruptions of two seconds of black clarified the concept of scene and frame and, most of all, it clearly showed the cue, so they were beginning to understand how “editing” works. But what I was mainly after was silences. In a speechless sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West, I explained the importance of those silences, I made them understand that often those silences are worth more than a hundred words. I warned them, explaining that they were the protagonists of the film but that the supporting actors (Claudio Santamaria, Matheus Natchingale, Chiara Caselli, Leonardo Medeiros) were professionals who knew very well how to use those silences in a scene and knew very well how to take their time before replying. In front of Leone’s and Hitckcock’s images they immediately saw what I meant. During the shooting, it was enough for me to say: “remember Once Upon a Time in the West…” and Ambrosio would say: “I know what you mean, Marco”, and he made long pauses looking at the white man, before speaking. Their rapid time of learning was incredible. They became actors in five months.
Matheus Natchingale, the Brazilian actor who plays Dimas in the film, asked the script writer Luiz Bolognesi if he thought it was a good idea to play another film with the same Indians, as Matheus is also a director. Luiz answered on the spot: “Actors normally don’t play in one film only”.
Marco Bechis