Since the launch only a few years ago, the “Trachamp” section of Annecy has been a paradise for powerful independent characteristics, and this year’s selection is particularly strong.
Selected to compete with these very rare is “Nimuendajú”, the first characteristic of the director of Minas Gerais, Tania Anaya. Brazilian-peruvian co-production, the film tells the story of Curt of German origin “Nimuendajú” Unckel (1883–1945), a social specialist who lived with Aboriginal peoples for 40 years.
Curt, represented by the German actor Peter Ketnath, who also co -produced the film, was baptized in 1906 by the Guarani tribe: “Nimuendajú” or “the one who made a house” in Guarani, and devoted his life to study and understand different cultures.
As such, he witnessed the persecution of indigenous peoples and was one of the first Western activists who tried to shed light on these brutal evictions.
“Nimuendajú” heads for Annecy with the Brazilian international distributor O2 Play on board, managing Brazilian and world rights. Before sharing his film with Annecy’s audience, Variety spoke with director Tania Anaya about the experience of creating such a functionality, a trip thirteen years in preparation.
Tania Anaya
What brought you to animation in the first place?
I studied at the School of Fine Arts of the UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais), and I did not think much of animation because I did not know it apart from the cartoons of Disney and TV, which did not interest me much.
At that time, a collaboration agreement was created between Brazil and Canada, which included the creation of animation centers in Brazil in partnership with the National Film Board of Canada. A Brazilian animator, Marcos Magalhães, came to the School of Fine Arts to present this collaboration, and I was delighted by the films he presented. There were films with very different techniques, using pastels of oil, colored pencils, acetate, cutouts, painting, seeds …
An animation center was created at school and I started studying at Minas Gerais Animation Center. From then on, I plunged into this universe. To date, Norman McLaren, an incredible artist and one of the founders of the NFB, remains one of my greatest inspirations.
How did you meet the figure of Curt Nimuendajú?
I wanted to talk about Curt Nimuendajú because he lived between two worlds. “Nimundajú” is the story of a self -taught man who abandoned his last name and adopted the native.
Nimuendajú spent years living between these two worlds: six months in indigenous villages inside Brazil and six months at home in the city of Belém, recording everything he had sought and lived. He lived an interconnected life between the “white world” and the “native world”, between the countryside and the city. Studious, concentrated, passionate and observer, he reinvented himself with each Aboriginal people, creating bonds of affection, learning and recording.
Curt Nimuendajú managed to gather and organize the largest amount of data on Brazilian Aboriginal peoples to date, studying nearly 50 of them. His work is still relevant today.
For me, his passionate dedication is inspiring and the Nimuendajú trajectory allows us to tackle indigenous problems.
How did the material you found throughout your research have influenced your creative process?
Our Nimuendajú is based on historical references, an ethnographic material that he wrote and on commemorative recordings left alone in his newspapers and letters or by other researchers who studied him. His texts and photographs transmit his passionate presence in the first person, but as this subject addresses complex questions beyond historical research, we had to design a unique approach.
We invited the anthropologist Elena Welper, specialist in Curt Nimuendajú, to advise us throughout the film’s production process. In addition to her great knowledge in the collections of Nimuendajú, she also translated a large part of the German equipment and transmitted her enthusiasm to us, highlighting details that would otherwise go unnoticed.
During the script writing scene, we also had the help of anthropologist Julio Cezar Melatti, an expert from the Timbira people, studied by Nimundajú and presented in the film.
Our biggest challenge was to synthesize all of this in an 80 -minute film.
How did the involvement of the indigenous communities with which you worked influenced the film?
Filming on site, experimenting and feeling the daily life of each indigenous people, listening to their languages and their songs was fundamental to making this film. This choice was made to avoid general concepts and clichés on indigenous peoples and to show that each people is a universe in itself, unique, with their own aesthetic, cultural, social and political repertoire.
“Nimuendajú” pulling an apinaye tribe
This experience had a strong impact on our team because it brought a layer of understanding that the script and the storyboard did not cover. The interpretation of Peter Ketnath as Curt Nimuendajú was particularly enriched by this experience.
Another important aspect of on -site filming was ambient sounds, dialogues and ritual songs recorded in Aboriginal villages. This material was the basis of building the soundtrack on which the whole animation was based.
The opportunity to shoot in the Aboriginal villages revealed diapers that we had not even thought before and prepared us to animate from a new base. The action with the indigenous peoples worked well, there was curiosity, collaboration and the most delicate situations were resolved.
For the shooting, the apinayé has reconstructed a custom described and photographed by Curt Nimuendajú, which had not taken place for 40 years. The reconstruction involved the whole village and ended with a song in which they asked their ancestors to forgive them for having forgotten.
Among the Canela-Rankokamekrá, the generation of uncles, grandparents and parents involved with Curt Nimuendajú in the 1930s was played by their grandchildren, nephews and parents, therefore giving the film a moving and powerful tone.
It is interesting to see that in the film, your main character is not perfect and heroic. Why was it important to question your own heroism?
To quote Eisenstein: “How should I write so that man, whatever the fact that he can be, emerges from the pages of history about him with this physical palpability force of his existence, with this power of his half imaginary reality, with which I see and feel it?”
Curt Nimuendajú was a man of his time, full of imperfections and bad choices, who in today’s eyes are even more serious. However, his tenacious struggle and his undeniable affection for the indigenous peoples with which he lived and allied is still very relevant today. His imperfections are also part of his humanity.
What were the main technical challenges of creating this feature film?
From the start, I chose to film before animation. We filmed in 2012, with a very small team, and our stay in Aboriginal villages was an adventure full of surprises and improvisations. We did not have access to tools like the Internet, the phone or sometimes electricity, so we only used natural light.
Although language differences have sometimes caused confusion, filming in an indigenous area is a physical and metaphysical experience, and I am very happy to have lived it. Getting to know the better transformed people and environments the story we wanted to tell. As I mentioned earlier, we made significant changes to the script after having gone to Aboriginal villages.
Being a period film, even with real images, many adaptations had to be made during the animation. For example, the indigenous peoples wore shorts during the shooting, but were animated as if they were naked. Most had short hair and had to be animated with long hair. Everything had to be adjusted to characterize the beginning of the 20th century.
“Nimuendajú” pulling an apinaye tribe
Our team of animators also had to be trained to make realistic drawings of the human body, because most of them came from animations with a caricatural style.
We did not want to use the filmed images as a simple rotoscopy, strictly following the photographs. We wanted to print our own aesthetics to the film, with variations in lines and the accent on anatomy, in the style of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele. We wanted to stylize the characters, free ourselves from the imposition of the filmed image and enter the field of imagination. To do this, we only used the images filmed for key drawings; Everything else was done in traditional 2D animation.
At each stage, new challenges arose. In Brazil, there are still few long animation productions, so we still lack specialized professionals and systematic paths. There was a lot of fact and learning in this fascinating process, which still takes place today.
How would you describe the animation state in Brazil today, and has it evolved during your career?
With the return of Lula government in 2023, audiovisual public policies resumed and we ended up with a certain stability and opportunities for the sector. Associations, unions and groups also help to regulate the animation market, which has increased and now has many people who work there, consolidating an ecosystem.
However, it is always necessary to adjust these public policies, taking into account the particularities of animation. An animated film takes years to do, “Nimuendajú” took 13 years. This is why he needs more support. The animation is more expensive, but it has been reduced under live production budgets.
Even in this context, there was a significant increase in the production of series, video games and feature films in Brazil. This stimulates the training of new artists and technicians and also increases interest in animation schools and international co -productions.
The subject of the film is very relevant today, because minorities around the world are faced with threats of harassment and sometimes their extermination. How do you feel this film today?
The heart of the film is the conflict between the “white world” and the “native world” in the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this conflict is still relevant more than a century later.
Bloody conflicts continued to occur throughout the 20th century. For example, in 1950, in southern Brazil, the Xetá people were exterminated. In the 1960s, the construction of a vast highway in southwest Amazon erased dozens of Aboriginal communities. The same thing occurred in the early 1970s in the region where the Trans-Amazonian highway was built.
The indigenous peoples who have survived all this barbarism are now faced with the same homicide intolerance list. The legacy of the far -right government of Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2022, always has a strong impact and leaves its mark in Arsons, murders of indigenous leaders and land invasions by minors and loggers.
This ancestral conflict was to be presented in “Nimuendajú”, because our character, with regard to his indigenous companions, is found in the epicenter of these questions.
