'News of the World' star Helena Zengel is the presenter of the first film in more than ten years by South African director Pia Marais. The film has a dreamy atmosphere, but is difficult to describe narratively.
The Incredibly Unique Environment of the Amazon Rainforest | Equator
Rebecca Byrne, the teenage lead of “Transamazonia,” has a distant, otherworldly aura befitting someone who has literally fallen from the sky. As a little girl, a plane she was flying in crashed into the remote depths of the Amazon, leaving her the only survivor of the tragedy. Hailed by the media as a child prodigy, she has since stayed where she fell, building a reputation in the rainforest as a Christian faith healer. It’s a testament to Helena Zengel’s gripping, mysterious lead role that we’re never quite sure whether miracles are Rebecca’s blessing or her brand. This central conundrum informs the other, frequent ambiguities of Pia Marais’s intriguing environmental fable—in which religious missionary work and industrial deforestation both threaten indigenous identity.
Premiering in Locarno’s main competition, with a spot at the New York Film Festival on the horizon, this is a formally muscular and characteristically searching fourth feature from the South African-born writer-director Marais: Her last film — the simmering 2013 character study “Layla Fourie” — may have been set in her homeland, but her career has otherwise been built on a wholly international perspective. Postcolonial questions of belonging and displacement run rampant in “Transamazonia,” which takes pains not to exoticize the little-portrayed region of Brazil in which it’s set, and to secure the cooperation of the Assurini people of the country’s indigenous Trocará region. (They’re jointly listed as associate producers.) Yet there’s an opacity to the characterization of this ambitious, conscientious film on all fronts that hampers our emotional engagement even as it holds our interest.
Rebecca isn’t alone in her Amazonian refuge. Her American missionary father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), who picked her up after the crash, seems to have taken the tragedy and its location as a kind of spiritual guideline. He’s set up his own mission in an abandoned Baptist camp in the jungle and made Rebecca the star attraction of his archaic evangelical sermons, attended by natives who believe she has healing powers. If so, Lawrence’s showy showmanship as a preacher — with the makeshift interiors of the mission bathed in eerie turquoise light — seems like a very big nonsense.
