Taego Ãwa

Henrique Borela, Marcela Borela / Brazil / 2016 / East European Premiere / 75 min.

synopsis

Tutawa Tuagaek, the ageing leader of the Ãwa, a Brazilian indigenous tribe, is one of the last survivors of the 1973 massacre of Indians in the Amazon jungle. This team of filmmaker-ethnographers records his everyday life in the company of young followers, to whom he is trying to pass on his experiences. The Indian community’s everyday rituals are contrasted with found photographs and video clips that offer rare evidence of the atrocities that Tutawa recounts. Different epochs and visual formats create a continuum that reveals the traumatic history of an oppressed people who have managed to survive despite all odds.

"The imagination is not only mediator between understanding and sensibility, it has its own dynamism, scheme free, organized bodies, constituted individuals, fixed identities, consolidated psyches."

biography

Siblings Henrique (1989) and Marcela (1983) Borel, Brazilian filmmakers, explorers, and festival curators, apply their experiences with social scientific research in their film work: Henrique’s background is in social sciences; Marcela’s is primarily in cultural history. To date, both have made primarily short films, and together have directed, for example, the film Under Our Feet (2015). Taego Ãwa is their first feature-length film.