Untold (His)Stories

On Monday, the screen of the Slovenian Cinematheque gave us a glimpse of 600 years of Brazilian history through the medium of Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (Uma história de amor e fúria, Luiz Bolognesi, 2012). This is one of those stories which start at the distant end, in futuristic Rio de Janeiro in 2096. At the edge of a skyscraper, in a city evoking the metropolis from Scott's Blade Runner (1982), we still find the most archetypal – and timeless – love between a man and a woman, which the film intelligently weaves through a tale of the cruel colonial history of Brazil. The storyteller, a 600-year-old member of an Amazonian tribe which once lived on the same spot, takes us from the edge of the futuristic skyscraper to the beginning, the idyllic Amazonian rainforest – that is destined to become a desert.

 

The battle between a man, the hunter, and a jaguar reveals the double position of manhood through a carnival of disguises: the act of catching a jaguar, the kind of the rainforest, is considered a test of manhood. In place of the jaguar, the man first catches a woman clad in jaguar skin. Even though he manages to win her heart and body, he is unsuccessful in the hunt for the real jaguar which turns out to be a fatal slip up, a fall into the abyss of history. The redemptive leap into the abyss turns the man into a bird – the native god of the Tupinambá tribe has chosen Abeguar to become the saviour of his people, saving it from the white occupying force, the Anhangá, the name given by Native American mythology to the faceless evil which reincarnates in various guises and plays with human destiny.

 

We thus run into Abeguar and Janaina, his woman, at important pivotal moments of Brazilian history, unrecorded and unseen by the history written down by the victors (the white settlers): at the scene of the territorial battle between the French and Portuguese in 1566, two hundred years later at the scene of a slave rebellion against the exploitive hand of the authorities, in the time of the student guerilla rebellions against the military junta in 1968 and in future Rio, in the year 2096, where a private militia guards every drop of the almost evaporated water in the hands of the meaningfully named Aquabras. The name is a thinly veiled reference to one of the most controversial and corrupt Brazilian multinationals, Petrobras; paradoxically, the company also generously funds Brazilian culture, including last year's feature-length film, The Boy and the World (O Menino e o Mundo, Alê Abreu, 2013).

 

Abeguar's (and Janain's) first slip into the abyss will continue to happen until the person chosen by the gods finally defeats the evil Anhanga. At the same time, the first slip signifies Abeguar's powerlessness; along with Janaina, he is always on the side of the weak and the downtrodden. The film uses superb classic animation where the pencil wonderfully transfers all the emotional states of the actors onto the paper; at the same time, it avoids the nostalgic pathetic nature of the ideology of rebellion and revolution which we sometimes find in films with similar themes. Did the hero succeed in defeating destiny? The ending is left open, like the wings of the bird circling over history.

 

The film, which was made over a period of six years and includes the findings of extensive research conducted by historians and anthropologists, is visually stunning; it paints the Brazilian landscape with an eye for its beauty. The Brazilian feature-length film, which also manages to be socially critical, leaves an impact on each and every audience member through a phrase we sometimes prefer to overhear: "To live without knowing the past is to walk in the dark."

 

Anja Banko

 

***You can once again see A Story of Love and Fury at the end of the Festival at Kinodvor, on Sunday, 13 December at 10 p.m.

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