Final Rating: 4.5/5
Iracema: Uma Transa Amazônica by Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna is one of the most noteworthy films of the last fifty years in Brazilian cinema. Originally produced as a TV special for the German network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, the film aired in 1975 on ZDF and had its theatrical premiere at the Semaine de la Critique at the Festival de Cannes in 1976.
In Brazil, the dictatorship’s censorship banned its circulation until 1981. Recently, the film had a 4K restoration from its original 16mm reels by Cinegrell. The 4K restoration premiered at the 2024 Festival do Rio, and Gullane+ is releasing it in theaters.
The film merges documentary elements with a fictionalized story. Iracema (Edna de Cássia) is a fifteen-year-old indigenous girl who moves to Belém to perform sex work to help her family. She lives in a brothel, working to provide a decent life for herself and her family. Meanwhile, Tião (Paulo César Pereio) is a truck driver from the Southwest of Brazil who drives from São Paulo to Pará carrying loads of wood. In this sense, he lives on his truck and constantly visits the brothel to find young women to accompany him in the hardships of the day.
Iracema has a crucial and fascinating context around its production and subtext. The film revolves around the characters in a region that had an economic engagement in the 1970s. The Brazilian dictators would open the borders of the Brazilian Amazon to the international government, especially the United States, which funded the coup d’Etat in 1964.
In this sense, the film’s background is the portrayal of the promise of the Transamazonic road building, a four-thousand-kilometer highway connecting the Amazon’s interior with other Brazilian regions. Its construction has a backstory of corruption by the authoritarian military regime, which did not have any oversight to denounce its budget manipulation.
Consequently, Iracema is a painting of its era in a precise manner. Tião is a moralistic character whose shallow discourse inflames his self-proclaimed pride in his country. In his windshield, he has an adhesive with the slogan of the regime: “Brazil, love it or leave it”. Besides the fascist connotation of expelling opponents, Tião is the caricature of the dictatorship’s supporters. They defend the period of history by mentioning the alleged economic success, leading to exponential inflation in the decades to come. The truck driver does not worry about the thousands of people murdered and the disappeared people. The capitalistic value of money over the safety and lives of people.
Bodansky and Senna employ the road movie to record in a social realist formal organization the inequalities present in the region. The extraction of wood destroys the forest and any hope of a prosperous future for those occupying the lands, which would be expelled from them by the major farmers with the support of the government.
It borrows from a prolonged absence of agrarian reform to support those who truly supply the extractivism in the country. They also tackle the problem of child and teenage prostitution in the Amazon, a common practice in various states in the northern region.
In the formal experimentation between fiction and non-fiction, it shines a light on Paulo César Pereio’s brilliance, one of the greatest actors in Brazil. His character is a fascinating and disgusting portrayal of a type of man who discards women and mistreats them. His scene partner, the fifteen-year-old Edna de Cássia, delivers a raw performance that fascinates for its vulnerability, wearing a boldness that does not reflect her faithful emotional state.
Iracema: Uma Transa Transamazonica is a groundbreaking experiment in Brazilian cinema. It mixes documentary and fiction to challenge the authoritarian government of Brazil. It also tackles youth prostitution in an approach that reminds one of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, but it never abandons its third-world realist approach.
Thank you to Gullane and Sinny Comunicação for the screener.
