Noticias

Maya Da-Rin’s subtle, poetic debut about a man with a mysterious fever engages with the hidden lives of the Desana people of Brazil

Here is a mysterious and opaque movie, a feature debut from 42-year-old Brazilian artist and film-maker Maya Da-Rin. It does not give up its meaning easily, or perhaps at all. Newcomer Regis Myrupu won the best actor prize at the Locarno film festival for his understated performance as Justino, a member of the indigenous Desana people working as a security guard at a container port in Manaus harbour in northern Brazil. He is a widower, fussed over by his affectionate daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), who has just got into medical school at Brasília and will have to move away very soon and may not see her dad for many years. And perhaps that is what has caused a strange, profound unease in Justino. He suffers from...

A man is standing still, facing the camera. He wears a construction hat and a neon safety vest over a bulletproof one. It is nighttime, he’s shrouded in darkness. He closes his eyes as the camera slowly pans out, as if to better tune into his surroundings. The din around him suggests a natural scene, crickets drowning out all else. Only gradually do we begin to hear the sounds of machinery. As Justino (stoic newcomer Regis Myrupu) is lulled into sleep, a radio call brings him back into himself. It’s then we see he’s been standing in front of a shipping container, one of the many he’s tasked with patrolling during his shifts as a security guard at the Manaus cargo port.

This poignant opening moment sets up the tensions between nature and modernity, labor and rest, that structure Maya Da-Rin’s captivating debut fiction feature,...

By any conservative approximation, in the week that spanned the moment I left the Locarno screening of Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever and the minute I began writing this piece, an area as vast as 100 million square meters has been wiped away from Brazil’s Amazon basin. Over that seven-day window, President Bolsonaro has rushed to oust scientists unaligned with his regime, the international community promised sanctions against Brazil, and the Twitterverse rallied to the paean #PrayforAmazon, all while a surface as large as a one-and-a-half soccer field continues to disintegrate to flames each and every minute. The Fever, director-cum-visual artist Da-Rin’s first full-length feature project, puts a human face to a statistic that hardly captures the genocide Brazil is suffering. This is not just a wonderfully crafted, superb exercise in filmmaking, a multilayered tale that seesaws between social realism and magic. It is a call to action, an...

The Brazilian filmmaker Maya Da-Rin has garnered attention for her documentaries Terras (2009) and Margem (2007), both shot in the Amazon region. Now, she is back with her fiction debut, an enigmatic film capable to explore the mystery of the Amazon forrest to create a dream-like atmosphere that impregnates the viewer like a burning fever. In it, Justino (Regis Myrupu), a middle-aged member of the indigenous Desana people in Brazil, begins to come down with a vague illness while working as a security guard at a shipyard in Manaus. His daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto) is preparing to leave her father to study medicine in Brasilia. The two are caught between their family's past in the Amazon and their present in an urbanizing Amazon.We interviewed the writer-director about her new feature The Fever, which had its world premiere in the International Competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival.Notebook: What is your...