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‘Transamazonia’ Review: A Faith Healer Begins to Ask Questions In a Handsome Amazon Mood Piece
Helena Zengel anchors the humidly atmospheric 'Transamazonia,' the first film in over a decade from South African director Pia Marais.
This central enigma informs the other, manifold ambiguities of Pia Marais ‘s intriguing environmental fable — in which religious mission work and industrial deforestation both pose threats to Indigenous identity. Postcolonial questions of belonging and displacement play heavily into “Transamazonia,” which is at pains to avoid overly exoticizing the little-portrayed region of Brazil in which it unfolds, securing the collaboration of the Assurini people of the country’s Trocará Indigenous Territory. The Church’s place in this stand-off is up for debate, though Marais’s script (co-written with Willem Drost and Martin Rosefeldt) skirts shy of a stance, watching from a cool distance as these three incompatible factions circle each other.
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