Macunaíma

[Cremildo]

Brazilian writer-director Felipe Bragança, whose “Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl!” played Sundance and Berlin in 2017, has enrolled a team of cutting edge Brazilian indigenous artists to realize movie “Macunaima,” his contemporary reimagining of one of the most important novels in Brazilian literature.

Zahy Guajajara, a poet, actress (“The Brothers”), who formed part of the motorbike gang in “Alligator!,” and indigenous activist, has boarded “Macunaima” as a script collaborator, and the movie’s co-director. Denilson Baniwa, a visual artist and another indigenous activist, will serve as a visual consultant and collaborator.

Anthropologist Hermano Vianna has also joined “Macunaíma” as a script collaborator and conceptual consultant. Set to be presented at International Film Festival Rotterdam’s CineMart co-production market in early February, the insider knowledge and creative talent that these figures bring to the project ensure that it will not be made by an uninformed white outsider, Bragança told Variety in the run-up to CineMart.

Set up at Brazil’s Duas Mariola Filmes, headed by Marina Meliande, and co-produced out of France by Samuel Chauvin’s Promenades, “Macunaíma” is backed by Globo Filmes, the film production arm of Brazilian TV giant Globo.

That means that it is one of a drastically diminished number of movies that stands a good chance of getting made in a Brazil where state film incentive adjudication has begun again but flows at a glacial pace.

Every two generations of Brazil has a “Macunaíma.” The first was the hugely influential 1928 novel by Mário de Andrade, turning on a shapeshifting young man, Macunaíma, who is born in deep virgin jungle, which is hailed as one of the foundation texts of Brazilian modernism. In 1969, Cinema Novo director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade made an updated comedic adaptation, which works as an allegory of 1969 Brazil after the military coup.

The novel was an early vanguard attempt to create an artistic language in Brazil, melding black and indigenous cultures, in a country just independent from Portugal, Braganza commented. [+]