Ariel Kuaray Ortega’s complex docufiction sifts through the mysterious story of a man who, during the military tyranny, is said to have become a big cat
Here is a complex, mysterious docufictional mediation which unfolds at an unhurried walking pace, co-authored by the Indigenous Brazilian film-maker Ariel Kuaray Ortega, a member of the Mbyá-Guarani movie collective; it’s evidently been a personal project, many years in the making, and a prizewinner at the 2023 IDFA festival in Amsterdam. Ortega returns to his home town in a remote forested region on the border with Argentina, on a mission to investigate a local legend that a man called Canuto, from his grandfather’s generation, was transformed into a jaguar.
The film is at once a documentary on this subject and a record of the fictional re-enactment that Ortega is staging using local people – and, in a way, it is a film about itself. He speaks to his aged grandfather and to villagers about their customs and beliefs and their fraught relationship with the military tyranny of the time; it was a period notorious for the desaparecidos – the “disappeared” – which provides an enigmatic political context for Canuto’s vanishing and the authorities who appropriated their lands without compensation. There are also sharp comments on a certain high-handed “white architect” who designed an award-winning wooden community centre for them, which the community itself regards as exasperatingly flimsy and unfit for purpose, and which they plan to break up for lumber.
