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The apparition alongthe riverbank pleases the ecotourists tooling along a stretch of the Amazon atthe start of BirdwatchersIndianswearing only loincloths and body paint, staring sullenly at their boat.Although the tourists speed off when the Indians shoot a few desultory arrowstheir way, the encounter only enhances the verisimilitude of the off-roadtourist experience. In the next scene the Indians troop away to an old pickuptruck, pull T-shirts and shorts over their war paint and take money from anoverseer. Turns out it was just a stunt for the foreignersa startlingcinematic transition in a story of startling transitions.
The Brazilian filmis a loosely but well composed dramatization of Indians reduced to a squalidexistence on reserves that lack the resources to sustain them. They must huntoff the reserve for food and poach the cattle whose grazing is helping destroythe once lush rainforest that was their home. The Indians are afflicted withalcoholism and suicide and forced into low-paying servitude; their squatters’camps are sprayed from airplanes with choking insecticide, their leadersmurdered by vigilantes. Still, some members of the tribe preserve theirshamanistic ways against a society trying to erase them from the pages of life.
Transitions andjuxtapositions are everywhere. The poverty of the Indians is set to the baroquemusic of the colonists who forced their ancestors from their land; themotorcycle of the rich white girl races along a jungle path where Indian boysare hunting birds with bows and arrows; the aerial view of the verdantrainforest changes abruptly; like a child’s coloring book it crosses the linefrom green into the brown wasteland that passes for civilization.
Birdwatchersscreens at 7 p.m. April 16.
The Cold War wasnever cool in much of Latin America, but rather involved insurgencies andcounterinsurgencies and sparked coups and intervention (covert as well asovert) by the United States.It was a murderous struggle between conflicting values and ideologies.
TheUruguayan-Argentinian-Chilean co-production MataraTodos (Kill Them All) dramatizes the aftermath of those years as anUruguayan prosecutor, Julia, pursues a trail of dead ends concerning a missingperson at the heart of a secret collaboration between the armies of severalLatin American states during the 1970s and ’80s. The missing man was a Chileanchemist who worked to develop sarin gas and other chemical weapons for thePinochet regime and disappeared when he threatened to tell all.
What’s revealingabout this low-key political thriller is how the Cold War conflicts dividedfamilies. From the whispering around the dinner table, we gather that Julia’sfather, a retired general, had been involved in a covert war againstsubversives. Her brother, an officer in military intelligence, warns her toback off the case. Stone walls are erected on all sides by officials fromseveral countries either eager to conceal their own past or frightened for thefragile state of their nations’ democracies.
Matar aTodos screensat 7 p.m. April 17.