VENICE () - A new Italian film brings to the screen the clash between Amazon Indians and affluent Brazilian ranchers, exploring the collision of two worlds against a backdrop of land disputes, shrinking forests and poorness.
"Birdwatchers", which is in competitor at the Venice plastic film festival, was warmly applauded at a press cover on Monday, lifting domestic hopes that one of four Italian movies in the master competition crataegus oxycantha scoop the Golden Lion top accolade.
Set in Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazil's breadstuff basket, the film focuses on a group of indigenous Guarani-Kaiowa with no prospect other than functional in slavelike conditions for rich farmers and posing for tourists' cameras for a little cash.
Pushed by hunger and recurring suicides in their community, the natives decide to allow for their stockpile and camp outside a sugar-beet woodlet to claim their ancestral land back up.
Half documentary and half fiction, the cinema features 230 Guarani people on their first outing as actors, alongside an Italian and Brazilian cat in encouraging roles. The actors speak local languages with subtitles.
Italian director Marco Bechis, world Health Organization has a Chilean female parent and grew up in Brazil, aforesaid his was a celluloid about the "survivors of one the greatest genocides in history".
The Indian universe numbered an estimated 5 million when Portuguese explorers first landed in 1500 in what would get Brazil. Over the centuries, they have suffered captivity, extermination campaigns, disease and neglect.
They now number about 460,000 in about 230 tribes, according to campaign grouping Survival International.�
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