PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Mariana Oliva, director of the documentary Piripkura.
The feature documentary Piripkura, a prize winner at the previous edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, had its French premiere in the program of the 31st International Festival of Audiovisual Programmes (Fipa) in Biarritz, France. It is here that we met and interviewed one of its director, Mariana Oliva, credited alongside Renata Terra and Bruno Jorge for making this powerful documentary about a search through the Amazon forest for two known survivors of the Piripkura people, members of an indigenous tribe of Brazil, who live in a protected area in the middle of the forest, with a troubled and tragic history. Oliva explains some of this history and just how much we can learn from these seemingly uneducated people and the way they live. In this interview, she also talks about one of the lessons of her documentary, an environmental message, the brutality and violence but essential beauty of the Amazon forest and the experience and challenges of filming there, and more.
Piripkura: “The indigenous Piripkura are an unacculturated tribe of which only three members remain, two of whom continue to live traditionally somewhere in the Amazonian wilderness, cherishing a burning ember given them by an officer of the agency responsible for their protection in 1998. The officer must find them again to prove that the region, coveted by industries responsible for deforestation and livestock, can still legally be considered an indigenous area. We follow the incredible search for the last two existing members of their kind from another age.” (Text taken from the official webstite of Fipa, http://www.fipa.tv/en/)