Martírio

When Vincent Carelli filmed the struggle of the Guarani-Kaiowá in Brazil in 1988, little did he know that twenty years later, the violence would be even worse. Returning among the battered resistance fighters, he explores the country’s colonial history.

When in 1988 Vincent Carelli filmed the Guarani-Kaiowa’s struggle to reclaim their lands in Mato Grosso do Sul, little did he know that twenty years on, the violence would be even worse and their acquired rights threatened by pressure from the agribusiness lobbies. Returning with his collaborators Ernesto and Tita, he explores the country’s colonial history. The rare octogenarians who have survived the expulsions and murders are the living memory of the successive waves of persecution. Martírio draws its strength from its unrelenting search for all kinds of oral material, be it television archives or interviews with the settlers’ descendants, who insist that Natives have never lived on their property: “An anthropologist said this was an Indian village… a cemetery… They’re making it up!” Uprooted several times, shot dead or run down by vehicles, the filmmakers’ interlocutors show the graves they have built and the land that has been wrested from them. Carelli also follows the court proceedings and political debates in which the FUNAI – a government agency created to implement Indian policies – finds itself ensnared, perhaps because it is the offspring of the “Indian Guard”. What drives him above all is a loyalty to these shrinking communities, to their rituals and their way of life. The filmmakers’ perseverance is an ode to this lasting and non-violent resistance. (Charlotte Garson)