Plots(1)
Director José Padilha starts his film with a Yanomami Indian who has had his fill of white people, anthropologists, and cameras. "You should be ignorant of us, but here you are taking my picture yet again," he snarls at the director. And this perfectly encapsulates an unparalleled scandal. The evil that has been done is rooted in the 1960s and 1970s, when a couple of anthropologists in the Venezuelan Amazon region discovered the Yanomami Indians. Their way of life had not changed for thousands of years. For anthropologists, this discovery was of immeasurable value, and at the time it gained a prominent position in scientific literature. But 40 years later, little remains of that triumph. What went wrong? Everything. And Padilha has the witnesses, victims, evidence, and images to prove it. Using the same approach as in his successful Tropa de Elite films, Padilha coolly reconstructs how the academic fairy tale deteriorated into unethical, vulgar mudslinging, with anthropologists accusing one another of genocide. But Padilha lets everyone have their say, including the ambitious scientists who have since been discredited. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)
(more)Reviews (1)
The reverse side of anthropology through the differences on the academic ground, in a wider context concerning exactly what an anthropologist can(’t) get away with these days. The central point is the fact that (not only) the anthropologists (un)knowingly take hostage the famous and already publicly known “prehistoric" Indian tribe, the Yanomami, driven by ambition, settling of accounts with other scientists or satisfaction of appetites. As is customary with the documentary work of José Padilha, his main advantage is that he leaves it up to the viewer to decide what to think and doesn’t say “this guy is really evil, this guy is touchy about the results of his lifelong research being overturned, this guy is like this and that guy like that". He simply submits the facts and offers them for discussion from all sides; including even the uninvolved academic community or Yanomamos themselves.
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