O2 Play, one of Brazil’s most active international distributors, has acquired worldwide rights to “Nimuendajú,” an impactful 2D animated biopic of Germany’s Curt Unckel, a pioneering defender of Brazil’s Indigenous communities.
Also set to distribute “Nimuendajú” in Brazil, O2 Play has shared an international trailer in exclusivity with Variety.
In a double market strategy, O2 Play’s head Igor Kupstas will host a market screening at the Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film before “Nimuendajú” plays the prestigious Contrechamp section at June’s Annecy Animation Festival whose artistic director Marcel Jean has hailed the film as “astonishing.”
The debut feature of Minas Gerais-based Tania Anaya (“Drum Heart,” “Agtux”) “Nimuendajú” boasts at times the delicacy of much 2D Brazilian animation – think the Oscar-nominated “The Boy and the World” – especially when it pictures Amazon forest landscapes. But its tones are darker and more strident capturing moments of violence, or when it incorporates period archive photos of members of Indigenous communities, now on governmental reserves.
That tonality befits its subject. Lead produced by Belo Horizonte’s Anaya Produçoes Culturais, the film chronicles the heroic life of social scientist Curt Unckel who relocated from his native Jena in Germany to Brazil as a wide eyed 20-year-old 1903. He began living with the Guaraní in 1905, who christened him “Nimuendajú.”
A witness of a mass massacre of a Guaraní group by a local cattle rancher – which is dismissed by a federal government official as the cost of “the development of civilization” in one of the film’s many memorable scenes – Unckel “had one priority: to produce data and register the memory and future of Indigenous people who, he believed, were about to be extinguished,” director Anaya comments in a epilogue title card.
In another sense, Unckel was a pioneer, being murdered in 1945 in a Tikuna village in the Amazon. Reasons for his death “remained unknown,” Amaya adds. “In that way, his history is not different from the story of other Indigenous people and native people’s activists and defenders, lots of them murdered without having their killers punished for these crimes. To all of them our tribute.”
“Director Tanya Anaya succeeds in capturing this man’s deep commitment as he witnessed first-hand the persecution suffered by Indigenous people,” commented Annecy’s Marcel Jean.
Peter Ketnath (“Passport to Freedom”), the German actor who starred in Marcelo Gomes’ Cannes-selected “Cinemas, Aspirins and Vultures,” voices Unckel/Nimuendajú, making ample use of voiceover reading of letters his character writes to his sister back in Germany and friend Carlos, updating them on critical moments in his life-story.
Ketnath also co-produces “Nimuendajú” via his production company Cinezebra, alongside Perú’s Apus Animation, The film had the participation of the Apinayé, Canela Rankokamekra and Guarani Communities. Director Anaya has also dedicated much of her life to aiding Brazil’s Indigenous communities. She worked as an arts teacher with Minas Gerais’ Maxakali people, who were studied by Nimuendajú, teaching them drawing, illustration and graphic arts. She and the tribe wrote books and newspapers in the Maxakali language. This co-existence culminated in the “Ãgtux,” a hybrid doc animation medium feature, awarded at Germany’s 2007 Oberhausen Short Film Festival.
At Cannes, O2 Play will also hold a market screening of “Our Dear Lives” (“Querido Mundo”) co-directed and co-written by legendary Brazilian TV and theater great Miguel Falabella, a screenwriter, playwright, director, actor, producer and TV presenter who has brought multiple Broadway musicals to Brazil and wrote and directed the Carmen Maura-starring drama “Venice.”
Co-helmed with Hsu Chien (“Licença para Enlouquecer”) and described as a bittersweet dramedy about unlikely encounters, personal collapse and the quiet resilience of starting over, “Our Dear Lives” is set against New Year’s Eve celebrations on Copacabana. As fireworks and jubilation explodes, two strangers find themselves trapped in a decaying apartment building – a correlative for the emotional and physical ruins of their lives that didn’t go as planned.
“Our Dear Lives” is co-written by Falabella and his lifelong creative partner, the late Maria Carmen Barbosa (“Salsa e Merengue”). “The film weaves humor, tenderness and melancholy into a whimsical, fable-like narrative – the signature tone that defined their acclaimed contributions to Brazilian theater and television,” O2 Play notes.
Our Dear Lives
Courtesy of O2 Play
