In 1996, a Brazilian official and a Swedish journalist ventured into the Amazon to document the isolated Korubo tribe caught in escalating land conflicts. Initially hailed as a heroic breakthrough, the footage now demands to be reexamined. Uncovering the hidden costs of “discovery,” Amazomania [+lee también:
entrevista: Nathan Grossman
ficha de la película] confronts the colonial legacy and exposes the long-term repercussions for the Korubo people. We sat down with Nathan Grossman, the director of the documentary, competing at CPH:DOX. 

Cineuropa: How did you come across this story?
Nathan Grossman: It's a crazy thing. It was actually a friend of mine who had been approached by a producer, and he's in the fiction world. He came to my office and he said, “I heard that there's this archive existing here in Sweden. Have you heard about it?” And I said, no, I've never heard of it. And he explained this story and said “it's with this filmmaker just a few hours from Stockholm. You should go see him and see if the tape still exists. Because I'm not sure if it's true”. So I contacted Erling and went to meet him. The tapes were scattered in different places and it was not clear how much of them was really still present. I asked if I was able to digitalise them and see what was on the tapes that still existed.

The entire first half of Amazomania consists of the original material from Erling Söderström’s Les tribus cachées d'Amazonie. Did you edit the material?
The first part of the film is our re-examination of the footage from all of the tapes that still existed. I think it's between 60 and 70 hours of rushes. And then you get a little glimpse of what Erling did in the early 2000s when he released his film, you get a little bit of a sense of what was in his film. The revisiting of the material was much more extensive than what was shown. And I think most of it ended on the cutting room floor and nothing or very little was translated from the language that the Korubo tribe spoke. So all of that is something that we have re-examined.

The conversation between Erling Söderström and the anthropologist Barbara Arisi captures all the contradictions in the thinking of Western white men about the rights of Native peoples: the narrative of the “untouched garden of heaven”, the photos, the “souvenirs” that were “stolen”. In your film, we see representatives of the Korubo community demanding restitution and compensation.
I watched the film with Erling a couple of weeks ago and he thought the film was fairly accurate in its portrayal. He didn't think it was the best film ever made, but he accepted the portrayal because I think he also thinks that it kind of showcases these two views in a sense. Legally speaking, Erling has the right to do whatever he wants with his material. European law is protecting that. And then you have another view of that with indigenous communities who feel that consent was not asked when this was recorded. And I think it's a very interesting and valid question with so many indigenous groups still living in voluntary isolation and with the changing climate and the changing environment that we have. Many of them will unfortunately come into contact with the non-indigenous world. And I think the film kind of asks many questions about how the media should act in relation to those future events. I think it's a very important and interesting question to look at.

You also shot the documentary I Am Greta [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Nathan Grossman
ficha de la película], about Greta Thunberg. Do you think documentaries on major topics, such as the environment or endangered cultures, can have an impact on young audiences and, in general, on society?
Yes, I think so. I think my interest in these kinds of questions started when I watched An Inconvenient Truth by Davis Guggenheim, about former vice president of the United States Al Gore's campaign about global warming. The cinematic space is one of the last places we have where people can immerse themselves in fairly tricky questions. I think that this cinematic space actually is one of the best places to understand more complex ideas. There's no better place to tell stories about environmental questions, climate change, indigenous rights. And I'm very happy that space still exists.