An Interview with Pia Marais

South African writer/director Pia Marais travels deep into the Brazilian jungle for Transamazonia, her hypnotic fourth feature. 

Rebecca (Helena Zengel) is a teenager who has been practicing faith healing with her missionary father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), in the Amazon. As a young child, she survived a plane crash in the rainforest (her mother didn’t), which reunited her with Lawrence. Rebecca is seen performing miracles, like helping a woman in a wheelchair walk. Of course, there are sceptics who don’t buy into Rebecca’s powers and Lawrence’s mission. Then Artur Alves (Rômulo Braga) asks Rebecca to ‘cure’ his comatose wife Fernanda – a request that might exceed her abilities. 

Transamazonia also depicts a battle waging between Artur’s logging company, which is engaged in deforesting the jungle, and harming the [fictional] Irauté tribe that lives in the region. When the Irauté block an access road in protest, Lawrence asks Artur to stop logging if Rebecca cures his wife.

Marais tells these two connected stories by immersing viewers in this hothouse atmosphere. The film heightens the sounds and textures of the rainforest with closeups and tracking shots that present the sweaty, urgent bodies of Lawrence and the Irauté people. Transamazonia also includes overhead images of the rainforest canopy and trees being felled, which magnify the ecological themes. 

The film also addresses issues of exploitation, colonisation, as well as the White Saviour complex – especially when Artur is chastised for taking wood and money out of the region, while Lawrence is criticised for taking souls. “What do any of us have except faith?” asks one character, as issues of truth and trust arise. Several of the characters practice deception, prompting viewers to question who and what to believe. 

Marais spoke with Sense of Cinema about her evocative film during its run at the New York Film Festival. 

– G.M.K

What prompted you to develop this story and address the topics of religion, deforestation, and colonialism in the framework of faith healing in the Amazon? 

That’s a long story. It started with a book I read by Juliane Koepcke, a German woman who grew up in Peru and the Amazon. Werner Herzog actually made a film about her. [Wings of Hope, 1985] She was in a plane crash with her mother in 1971. There were moments in her ghostwritten book that really left an impression on me. Originally, I wanted to find a way to adapt her story, but I didn’t want to make her story about her. I didn’t get the rights for different reasons, which was a good thing, because the German co-producers I was working with said, “You didn’t want to make a film about her life, so why don’t you go on a research trip to the Amazon, and you might get inspired.” 

Transamazonia

I began to research and ended up reading a lot of stories by Thomas Fischermann, a South American correspondent for the German newspaper, Die ZEIT. He was writing about a conflict in the Amazon between the Tenharim Nation people and the neighbouring logging town which didn’t exist on any map. I started reading about the crash of Koepcke, and all the wrong decisions and erratic behaviour around that, and the fact that there were so many missionaries in that plane. 

So, I started to research about missionaries now. I was surprised by how many missionaries there were working in the Amazon. I convinced Fischermann to take me on a trip to the Amazon. We went in 2015. I had never been before and didn’t know what to expect. When we landed in Porto Velho, there weren’t any trees. That was the first shock. I had this old-fashioned idea that there would still be forest. He took me up the Trans-Amazonica [Highway] and over a few weeks we visited logging towns and stayed with the indigenous nation he was writing about. Everywhere we went, the deforestation was out of control.

I grew up in South Africa, and visiting these missionaries reminded me of something very colonial. The missionaries were very lazy, lying around in hammocks listening to sermons recorded sometime somewhere. They were drinking orange juice that was pressed by indigenous people they convinced to come stay with them. They had this whole business going on there, collecting money, and living really well. It was so interesting. 

The rainforest is a character. Can you talk about filming in the Amazon? I can’t help but think of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, or Hector Babenco’s At Play in the Fields of the Lords, or James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and other films.

We had the same circumstances as Herzog on a much more impoverished level. We had a minimal budget. I was lucky to get the cinematographer, Mathieu De Montgrand, who came to the project two weeks before we started shooting. He had no preparation, and neither did I. He was so brave. I wondered how do you move in the rainforest? You can’t run with a handheld camera. We couldn’t afford a Steadicam. He used a gimble which allowed us to move and do these tracking shots. We have some drone shots from the top, but also some inside the forest because I wanted it to have an uncanniness. 

How did you work with the indigenous tribe(s) and understand their culture and get them to participate? 

The Irauté tribe per se, does not exist. We worked with three indigenous nations – Saterê-Mawé and Ticuna, Xavante, and the Asurini people – and because we worked with people from three different nations it was important that they create this nation together for the one portrayed in the film. Initially, we started the process of casting with a man who worked on At Play in the Fields of the Lords. He was like an activist for indigenous people and very connected. He went to Manaus and started to visit the villages, where he knows the chiefs, to ask permission to do casting. He helped us secure Hama Viera, the young boy, with long hair who played Silas. Around the same time, he was casting, I was location scouting. On my first trip to the Amazon, it was a frontier place. There really wasn’t law. If something happens, the army comes. In these parts, it is very criminal. It is more like a Bolsonaro environment, so we couldn’t shoot there. We finally found a road with forest on either side, an 11-hour drive from Belém, which is where John Boorman shot The Emerald Forest. It was a tiny reserve for the Asurini people. We reached out to them, and over time, we won their collaboration on the project. We wanted to cast the Asurini. It was clear we had to create a fictional tribe so as not to misappropriate any of the feelings of any of the indigenous people because they are all different. We had a two-week workshop, and they came up with name and certain rituals and did a kind of character preparation as a nation for this film and created a biography for these people.

Lawrence is an interesting character and I like the brash way Jeremy Xido plays him as a White Saviour. He’s a likeable charlatan. What are your thoughts on his character? 

I’m glad you see it that way. In the whole period of developing this and coming from where I am from [South Africa], it was important for this to be a deconstruction of the White Saviour. Jeremy [Xido] got that and had fun with that. He was willing to become quite ambivalent. He came to the project four days before shooting. He wasn’t the original actor for the part, but he ended up being Lawrence Byrne. Jeremy was a dancer, and he makes documentaries, and he has acted before. He came through the sound guy who thought of him. We met on Zoom, and I thought he has something mysterious about him, and at the same time, there is something funny about him. I always thought Lawrence Byrne has to have something funny about him because he has to be over the top. He is a charlatan to an extent, but I’m not sure how much he convinced himself of the opposite – because he is living a lie. In the back of his head, he knows. It was important to me that with Rebecca, the actress had to be believable because the two were so different, but they also had to connect intuitively.

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The characters all seem to believe what they want to rather than what is true. It’s science versus religion in a sense. Even when faced with facts, the characters double down on belief. Can you talk about this idea of self-deception in the film? 

It’s interesting that you say self-deception. I haven’t thought about it from that angle. From Byrne’s perspective, yes, it is self-deception, but I saw Rebecca from another perspective. When I started working on this, I was interested in this idea of trauma and a quote from Lacan, I think – I can’t quote it properly, but it stayed with me – saying trauma doesn’t happen in the moment of impact, but in revisiting what happened to you. To understand it, the trauma manifests itself. That was the starting point for the relationship between Byrne and Rebecca for me. Maybe that has something to do with self-deception? By revisiting trauma, you are denying it at the same time. 

I don’t judge the characters. I came back from Brazil with that feeling. We can’t judge deforestation, when one tree would mean a month of food on the table for a family, and they don’t have another possibility. This ambiguity and ambivalence in characters was important to me. Lawrence is a criminal, if you think about him rationally, he has kept Rebecca hostage, but at the same time, for me at least, she kind of saves him as well. Rebecca gives Lawrence this chance of redemption. So, I don’t judge him that harshly. I can’t. 

Several characters lie and deceive for personal gain. Others raise doubts and questions. Are you moralising about the lack of people’s trustworthiness and critical thinking?

Isn’t that the reality? That people, in the end, often act through their own perspective and for their own gain. I don’t think I could have idealised a situation. What Rebecca did is a question – does she believe that she can heal, or is she living in self-deception that she can heal? I didn’t want to answer that in the film. I don’t know that miracles exist, but it’s a miracle that this film exists! 

Do I, per se, believe in things like that? No, I don’t, but having researched and going to these healings in Brazil, and what I found more interesting is the states that people arrive in when they are in this situation. It affects me to see people almost losing consciousness. They convince themselves that something is happening to them. Maybe something is? 

Transamazonia

I also considered ideas about renewal and rebirth in Transamazonia. Rebecca gets a second chance at life when she is found after the plane crash. There is a haunting scene of her swimming in the baptismal pool, which suggests another kind of rebirth. What points did you intend with the film’s symbolism?

I like that thought. Even her giving Byrne a second chance, she’s allowing him to renew himself as well. It’s a chance of redemption. I’m not religious at all, by any means, but I do believe we need redemption. We have to be hopeful in the face of the cynical motives that drive people. But even if you take the character of Artur, even he transgresses to another frame of mind. The characters are moving into a place of more reflection from where they were coming from and what they did. They are shifting, temporarily or not. 

Both Artur and Lawrence have financial motivations for their actions. This plays into the film’s themes of exploitation and how the ecosystem is being destroyed. Is your film designed to be a cautionary tale?

On my first trip to the Amazon, we were driving through fields that were literally burning; they were simmering. You literally saw deforestation. Now you see green rolling hills with cattle on them, and you don’t know there was rainforest there. It is unspeakably crazy what we are doing. The intention of the film is a cautionary tale, but I don’t want to judge individual people. It’s for us to reflect upon what it is. I would never have attempted to tell a Brazilian story. It was that I grew up in a colony, more or less, and it was a theme I wanted to work with. By this conversation, with Byrne and Artur, they are two heads from the same body, and they are having this conversation. That’s moralistic, I suppose, but for me, the last shot of two faces at the logging site, is the cautionary tale. That shares the underlying meaning of the film.