Taego Ãwa

The old man with a weathered face has placed a crutch next to his chair. This tribal chief, Tutawa Tuagaek, still lives on Bananal Island (in the Brazilian State of Tocantins) surrounded by his descendants. To go by the history of his tribe, this is an exceptional situation. The videos found by the filmmakers in a university provide a rare testimony. Not only does Tutawa recount how the Whites massacred numerous Ãwa Indians in the eastern Amazon forest in 1973, but all his entourage also discover the photos and films of this former leader. The editing mixes these newly found images with the Ãwa’s daily life, from the ritual body painting carried out in the kitchen to the children’s games. Epochs and formats merge into a continuum whose form mirrors the permanence of a people. Among these archives, the Indians’ forced entry into the Brazilian Parliament in 2013 brings us back to the present and to a pressing issue that is made distressingly apparent by an attempt to walk around the island: the borders of the territory ceded to the Ãwa but still not recognised as theirs. Talking about the forest that she revisits in search of the birds and trees she knows, Tutawa’s daughter says with emotion, before being chased away once more: “We didn’t leave the forest. It was the Whites who made us leave it”. (Charlotte Garson)