I Am Greta director Nathan Grossman revisits his 1996 expedition to the Brazilian Amazon, which was praised for its rare footage of isolated indigenous communities, in his new film Amazonia, which will premiere at Copenhagen International Airport CPH:DOX. Documentary film festival.
The film is based on more than 60 hours of archival footage shot by Swedish adventure journalist Erling Söderström during an expedition to the remote Javari Valley in hopes of contacting the Korbo people. Almost 30 years later, Grossman returned to this material to examine not only the encounter, but how the story was put together.
“Amazonia”
Courtesy of Erling Soderström
The Swedish director, known for his award-winning documentary on climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2020, first encountered the film during the pandemic.
“A friend told me that he had heard that there was an archive of a Swedish adventure journalist just a few hours from where I live. I went to see Erling and he told me his story,” he explained.
Grossman made an agreement with Söderström to digitize the tapes and study their contents, not knowing what story would emerge. What he ultimately discovered was a gap between how the expedition was portrayed and what the raw materials revealed.
“We noticed a discrepancy between the way the material was presented earlier and what we saw during Rush, because a lot of stuff had been left on the cutting room floor in relation to the way it was presented in the early 2000s compared to what was on tape.”
Grossman worked with members of the Corbo community and anthropologist Barbara Arisi to uncover previously untranslated conversations between indigenous tribes and explorers, exposing misconceptions that could have had deadly consequences.
One of Grossman’s key editorial decisions in “Amazonia” is to present much of the original footage almost unmediated in the first half of the film, immersing the viewer in the same sense of exploration and discovery that shaped early storytelling, then challenging it. The second half begins with Söderström returning to the Amazon expedition after more than 25 years, but it doesn’t go as he had hoped.
The film’s title refers to a term Grossman and his team coined to describe the enduring fascination outsiders have with the region.
“(‘Amazonmania’) is like a time capsule. A lot of people in the West have a certain desire for that adventure story,” Grossman said. “But I think it’s also good to consider what the implications and ramifications are. We’re trying to get the audience to feel that thirst for adventure and then look at it critically.”
For the filmmakers, this approach reflects the broad fascination that many Western audiences still have for stories of adventure and discovery. Ultimately, the film questions how those stories are constructed and who they serve.
“Why hasn’t anyone talked about what this group has said? Why has their perspective been missing here?” Grossman asks. “Of course, that was something very central to me, to make this accessible to Corbo members so they could have their own voices and their parents’ voices heard.”
Grossman questioned the contradictions inherent in revisiting such material in his film, saying that executives in the Corvo community were entitled to produce the work and receive half of its profits. Still, he does not present the arrangement as satisfactory.
“I don’t think it’s complete or good enough. I hope that in 30 years’ time the Corvo community will be able to access this footage themselves and create something from it,” he says. The rights to the original archive currently belong to Söderström.
The issue is even more urgent given the fragile realities facing isolated indigenous communities, he says. “Roughly 200 indigenous peoples are currently living in self-isolation. Sadly, despite policies to avoid contact, more contact will occur. Such events occur when the natural world weakens.”
This raises uncomfortable questions about how such encounters should be recorded in the future. “Would we need a CNN team to go in there and livestream one of these events?” asks Grossman. “I’m interested in how people who have seen this movie view it.”
Co-produced by SVT with support from the Swedish Film Institute, the Danish Film Institute and DR, and co-financed with the European Union, “Amazomania” will have its world premiere at CPH:DOX on March 16th.
The festival will be held in Copenhagen until March 22nd.
