A digitally restored version of a fundamental title in the history of Brazilian cinema that mixes fiction and non-fiction in a road movie — starring a young girl from Iracema and an unruly truck driver — that travels through the destruction caused by a specific type of post-colonial capitalism: the construction of the Transamazon Highway. The film explores an area of the Amazon that was under the control of the armed forces at the time of the military dictatorship in Brazil.
Iracema, Uma Transa Amazônica is a fundamental work of Brazilian cinema. Firstly, because it calls on cinema to — in parallel with the greedy exploitation of capitalization in the Amazon region carried out by the government at the time — enter this space, documenting the process of land purchase and disfigurement of the terrain with the construction of roads, deceiving and putting at risk many of its population. Instead of a paradisiacal Brazil, the film, banned during the dictatorship, openly brought the environmental issue into play. Secondly, Bodanzky and Senna’s film is an important film for understanding how the tension between fiction and reality, in a method close to Jean Rouch’s shared anthropology, allows us to reach a sense of intense truth. Iracema is constructed without a script, based on the improvisation of the central actors in the “plot” (Paulo César Pereio and Edna de Cássia), and their spontaneous interaction with many of the people, loggers, farmers, prostitutes, who tried to surve in that place. (Carlos Natálio)
