BIRDWATCHERS (Marco Bechis). 102 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (February 4). For movie times, theatres, and trailers see Movies. Rating: NNN
In Brazil, visitors to Matto Grosso do Sul are told to keep an eye out for the Guarani. If you’re lucky, say the guides, you’ll see a few tribespeople, dressed in their traditional loincloths and body paint, watching balefully from the riverbank.
Invariably, they do see them. And once the boat has passed, the Guarani withdraw inland, change into their street clothes and collect a few bucks from the guides who’ve paid them to make their appearance. Then they go home to their lean-tos and shelters until it’s time to move on to the next camp.
Marco Bechis‘s BirdWatchers turns this paradoxical situation – an indigenous people who’ve learned to exploit their own traditions but remain bound to them – into a thoughtful drama, following a fictional band of Guarani whose newest ancestral settlement encroaches on a wealthy landowner. Tensions mount, cultures clash and eventually… well, what usually happens when natives square off against the white man?
The conflict is nothing new, but the intimacy with which Bechis burrows into his indigenous characters invests the story with new life. His filmmaking is a little on the rough side – the shaky-cam tactics used to suggest an angry spirit that stalks a young shaman in the forest are straight out of the Evil Dead movies – but he’s onto something.
