Mimes, Monkeys, And The Ghost Of 'Fitzcarraldo': Inside Brazil's Amazonas Film Festival

There are no movie stars in Brazil. When a local comedy show asked people to list the most famous Brazilians, the top three were Gisele Bundchen, Pele, and Blanka — the green ogre from Street Fighter 2 who got his powers from the bite of an Amazonian electric eel. So far in 2012, not a single Brazilian-made movie has cracked the top ten in the country's own box office — in fact, to find a domestic hit, you have to go all the way down to the romantic comedy E Ai...Comeu?, which to date has made about half of as many reals as Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. [Ed. correction: The production Até que a Sorte nos Separe does rank as Brazil's #10 box office performer of 2012.] But Brazil does have soap stars. And at the Amazonas Film Festival in Manaus, Brazil — the heart of the Amazon — soap stars, dozens and dozens of them, all handsome and cheerful and thrilled by their own fame, were the main event.

That a film festival celebrates soap stars makes no sense, until it does. One of the major reasons for trekking these TV celebrities out to Manaus is to lure schoolchildren to attend the free festival where, between hooting hellos at their idols, they watch a movie, fall in love with film and kickstart the next generation of Brazilian cinema.

The second reason for the soap star deluge is to make the rest of the country pay attention to Manaus. Until very recently, the 2.2 million capital city of the Amazon was only accessible by plane and boat; most of the celebrities in attendance from the southern metropolises of Rio and Sao Paulo had never been there at all. It takes longer to drive from Rio to Manaus than it does to drive from Los Angeles to New York, and the cultural distance between the two is so vast that the TV actors kept insisting to us gringo journalists that Manaus wasn't even really Brazil, but more like how we think of Alaska.

But if Manaus has a lot to prove, they've also got the money to do it. In case you haven't heard: Brazil is rich. And Brazil sets aside .85% of the federal budget to support the arts, while the United States manages a meager .066% — and Mitt Romney still wanted to kill Big Bird. The 2012 Amazonas Film Festival was a lavish spare-no-expenses wonder: Every night one to two movies screened for attendees sitting in the velvet chairs of the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house built in 1896, and every day, the festival hosted trips to waterfalls and rainforests and palaces. One afternoon, everyone trekked to a nature reserve to celebrate as Elizabeth the sloth was rechristened a native name meaning "Beloved by Humans." There was a fireworks salute, the clinking of goblets filled with Coca-Cola and Guarana soda, and then the DJ spun "Jungle Boogie.” Meanwhile, a concession stand employee fed stray marmoset monkeys like they were pigeons. And unlike Sundance in Park City, Utah, the film festival isn't even the town's high point of the year: Manaus hosts a big cultural festival every month for rock, opera, folklore, carnival, jazz, theater, dance, pop music, and even Christmas, which this year will be produced by Disney and aired on national TV.

Americans have seen Manaus before, even if they don't realize it. The Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez masterpiece Anaconda claims to have been shot there, although none of the locals would admit it. (They should.) So few feature films have been shot in the region that when the fest played A Floresta De Jonathas (aka Jonathas' Forest — “Jonathas” is not a typo), a trippy slow burn about a teenager lost in the jungle, it was heralded as the first flick filmed there in 10 years. Film nerds can name a third flick from Manaus: Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, which opens with Klaus Kinksi and Claudia Cardinale leaping from a canoe to dash up the stairs of the grand old Teatro Amazonas, desperate to see Enrico Caruso. But most Brazilians haven't heard of that movie either, though if you believe a word Kinski wrote in his sex-mad autobiography All I Need is Love, he had to have left behind at least a half-dozen half-Brazilian children.

The Teatro Amazonas (pictured at top), where the seven-day film festival was held, looks almost the same as it did when Herzog filmed there in 1982, except for the mime dressed like Charlie Chaplin who stalked the red carpet each night and eagerly leaped in front of every camera. At the opening of the Amazonas Film Festival, the old marble walls — imported from Italy back when the rubber barons of Manaus made it the richest city in the world — buzzed with energy. We American journalists were given headsets that translated the introductory speeches from Portuguese to English, not that they helped us make any sense of the moment when a soap star named Igor, a dead-ringer for Benicio del Toro, stormed the stage uninvited and shouted something loosely paraphrased as, "Thanks for letting me have sex with my girlfriend under a waterfall!" to State Secretary of Culture Robério Braga. Then he pulled a pair of sheer black pantyhose over his head like he was about to rob a convenience store, and fled the stage to massive applause. Lost in translation, I suppose.

The opening night film, Colegas (Buddies) has been sweeping up awards in Brazil. It's comedy version of Natural Born Killers with a twist — the two gun-toting lovebirds on the run with their best friend all have Downs Syndrome. Plus, the trio, headed by de facto leader Stallone (whose parents named him after their favorite actor) were so bored at their institution for the mentally handicapped that they spent their days memorizing old Hollywood movies on VHS. It's a Brazilian movie about American movies — even the credits riff off old posters for Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Godfather. When girlfriend Aniha waves a pistol in a fancy Buenos Aires restaurant, she hollers, “Everybody be cool — this is a robbery!” and when she and Stallone snuggle up, he whispers, “Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?” The inevitable Fox Searchlight remake will rake in millions, especially with the built-in controversy of a cast that's half-disabled. But there was no frisson of exploitation here, though when lead ingenue Rita Pokk literally lowered to her knees onstage to thank the director for allowing her to act, he hastily joined her on the ground.

Continued...

As for modern American cinema, it was represented by Craig Zobel's Sundance flick Compliance, inspired by a real-life crime where a fictitious policeman swayed a fast food manager to strip and rape an employee. The schoolkids clustered in the balconies hooted when the victim was forced to take off her shirt, but hushed when they realized they were as young — and as vulnerable — as the abused, and that this psychological attack could happen even in Brazil's local megachain Bob's Burgers.

Interestingly, there's no word for “compliance” in Portuguese, so the title had to be translated into Submission, which Zobel noted has a different connotation. (It turns out many languages don't have that concept — in Russia, the movie had to be retitled Obedience.) But Zobel took the transformations in stride — even his own, when the translators repeatedly called him “Greg Rogers” — and both he and Compliance were very popular in Manaus, especially with a deaf-mute who was delighted by the size of 6'4” Zobel's feet.

But the discovery of the film festival was Fernando Leon's La Cebra (The Zebra), a bitter black comedy from Mexico about two bandits caught in the maelstrom of the 1915 revolution. Leandro (Jorge Adrian Spinola) and Odon (Harold) are like a murderous Dumb & Dumber. While their country tears itself apart at the seams, they skulk around stealing what they can, which includes a zebra poached from a traveling circus that they name “Fucker,” thinking it means “gringo horse” en ingles. If you've ever been mystified by the dozen fake zebras lining Tijuana's tourist trap Avenida Revolucion, La Cebra explains why. But the road there detours into gunfire, a mescal trip, and even Leandro and Odon's kidnapping at the hands of four desperate women.

Still, La Cebra wasn't even the wildest thing to storm the Teatro Amazonas. After the closing night ceremony in which top honors went to Mads Matthiesen's Teddy Bear and the Brazilian drama Era uma vez eu, Verônica, the final madness was unleashed: A sample of the region's annual festival, Parintins, AKA the Battle of the Blue Ox versus the Red Ox. Tradition dictates that once upon a time, a pregnant woman asked her husband to kill his finest ox and feed her the tongue. He did, and then tried to bring the animal back to life by throwing a wild party. This tale has mutated into a festival where 200,000 people crowd a stadium and pledge allegiance to either the red or blue ox and compete over which team is the most krunk.

Picture Step Up 2 the Amazon with a cast of thousands wearing feathers and thongs. Like the Bloods and the Crips, color loyalty is so serious during the festival that Coca-Cola temporarily manufactures their soda can in red and blue; 100K blue loyalists would rather kill themselves than clutch a red can. That's no empty threat: Up to the 1960s, some fist-fighting revelers at Parintins actually died.

As Jon Voight said in Anaconda, “This river can kill you in a thousand ways.” But it can also thrill. The Amazonas Film Festival is unequaled in wild, wonderful weirdness. If you ever make it to that part of the world — and you should — it's a must.

The Amazonas Film Festival is held in Manaus, Brazil in November.

[Ed.: The original version of this story omitted the citation of the Brazilian film Até que a Sorte nos Separe and erroneously described the Parintins festival as a Manaus event because of its connection to the Amazonas film festival. A translation error regarding Secretary of Culture Robério Braga has been corrected.]

Amy Nicholson is a critic, playwright and editor. Her interests include hot dogs, standard poodles, Bruce Willis, and comedies about the utter futility of existence. Follow her on Twitter.

Follow Movieline on Twitter.