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‘Astonishing’ Annecy Entry ‘Nimuendajú,’ About a Pioneering Defender of Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples, Boarded by O2 Play (EXCLUSIVE)
A 2D animated biopic of ethnologist Curt Unckel, ‘Nimuendajú’ is also Cannes-bound, set to screen at its Marché du Film.
Lead produced by Belo Horizonte’s Anaya Produçoes Culturais, the film chronicles the heroic life of social scientist Curt Unckel who relocated from his native Jena in Germany to Brazil as a wide eyed 20-year-old 1903. A witness of a mass massacre of a Guaraní group by a local cattle rancher – which is dismissed by a federal government official as the cost of “the development of civilization” in one of the film’s many memorable scenes – Unckel “had one priority: to produce data and register the memory and future of Indigenous people who, he believed, were about to be extinguished,” director Anaya comments in a epilogue title card. Peter Ketnath (“Passport to Freedom”), the German actor who starred in Marcelo Gomes’ Cannes-selected “Cinemas, Aspirins and Vultures,” voices Unckel/Nimuendajú, making ample use of voiceover reading of letters his character writes to his sister back in Germany and friend Carlos, updating them on critical moments in his life-story.
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