Empty Vessels
By Eileen G’Sell
New York Film Festival 2024:
Transamazonia
Pia Marais, France/Germany/Switzerland/Taiwan/Brazil, no distributor
Moonlit mosquito nets soft as ghosts. Ants swarming a muddy hand. A naked man screaming down an unpaved road. A lace peter-pan collar beneath a young girl’s lacerated face.
Set in the humid depths of the Amazon basin, Pia Marais’s Transamazonia exudes a rhythmic, meditative quality in tension with its disquieting mise en scène and cogent postcolonial critique. Early on, we meet Rebecca, a young white girl seemingly left for dead in the rainforest. The sole survivor of a plane crash, she is rescued by a member of a local tribe and reunited with her scuzzy, tattooed father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), an American missionary whose spirited, spittle-flecked sermons draw crowds of indigenous followers.
As a teen, Rebecca (now played by Helena Zengel) gains fame among the local community for her ostensive “healing” abilities. Lawrence frames her survival of the plane crash as proof of God’s intervention. As a so-called “miracle child,” Rebecca (at times, reluctantly) lays her hands on the sick and disabled—in doing so, ingratiating herself with members of the local tribe. In one of many unsettling scenes, she commands a bespectacled tween in a wheelchair to stand and walk down the chapel aisle. “Anda! Anda!” she shouts in Portuguese, as the girl tearfully stumbles toward her. Rebecca is a blonde aberration from the throngs Hallelujahing around her. Marais compels us to consider just where her power comes from—an arrogant belief in Christian salvation? White supremacist instincts? A mix of both?
Whiteness itself looms over much of the film’s aesthetic. Rebecca, Lawrence, and their mission musician (Sergio Sartorio) are not only pale in complexion, but don entirely white clothing during white-tent revivals, in which indigenous attendees are also dressed all in white and sit in white plastic chairs. White mist shrouds the forest canopy, as though the dense, broadleaf foliage is inextricable from colonial surveillance. As trees are felled across the territory, evangelized followers fall to their knees. The sawmill is after the people’s land; the mission leaders, presumably, are after their souls. When Transamazonia trusts the power of the image, viewers are invited not only to consider the specter of whiteness but also our complicity in environmental degradation as consumers of Amazon resources. Directed by a South African white woman, the film is keenly alert to racial asymmetries, reminiscent of the work of Claire Denis, who, like Marais, was raised in Africa, though of French colonial provenance.
Not unlike the films of Denis, the specific historical context of Transamazonia can feel as hazy as the jungle fog—inferred through peripheral visuals rather than dictated via caption or voiceover. A MacBook glows in the mission office, and Rebecca takes a smartphone selfie with her giddy fans, but for the vast majority of the film the mission and sawmill feel utterly cut off from the digital age. Given the history of extractive capitalism in the region, along with its isolated nature, the film often feels like it could be 1994 as much as2024. And perhaps that’s part of the point: when it comes to the degradation of the rainforest, little has improved. The same can be said for the forces of evangelical Christianity invading “Indian land,” whether the Iruate territory at stake in this film or the Americas at large over half a millennium.
At the same time, Rebecca and Lawrence are not hastily pitted against the locals as mercenaries who care only for themselves. They align with the tribal community and pledge to stop the sawmill from razing its home—turning a blind eye when young indigenous men suck fuel from their tank, removing bullets from the limbs of the same young men who are shot while sabotaging sawmill machinery. While Marais stops well short of granting her white protagonists any kind of hero status, she also doesn’t paint them as devoid of virtue—a tendency in many films that can be at odds with any true critique of white supremacy. When white characters are represented as irredeemably bad, especially in a historic or exotic context, it often serves to reassure contemporary white viewers that they are obviously “better” morally than those they watch onscreen. Marais doesn’t let her audience off that easy.
Toward the climax, Rebecca is asked to carry out her most dramatic miracle. The film neither affirms nor refutes Rebecca’s healing properties, but lets us sit uncomfortably in a space of likely skepticism. Rebecca herself is neither malevolent fraud nor saintly figure; when her father perpetually pressures her to perform, she seems as ambivalent as we are about her supernatural gifts. The dad-daughter relationship also feels a bit too close for comfort at times; a hand lingers too long on a shoulder, and we’re left to wonder if Lawrence’s motives are wholly paternal.
To the film’s detriment, the drama between Rebecca and her father nearly eclipses the conflict between the sawmill and indigenous people. What is intended as plot twist distracts from more compelling questions of exploitation and power—ones that cross predictable race and gender lines for something truer and more gripping. “I am only a vessel,” Rebecca explains to the sawmill boss seeking help for his comatose wife. “Your faith is what really matters.” By the end of Transamazonia, it’s clear that no amount of religious fervor can save the forest or the people who dwell within it. And yet a shared fealty to something other than the forces of capitalism can lead to surprising allegiances.