A plane crashes in the Amazon jungle leaving a sole survivor, a five-year-old child named Rebecca, who is then saved just in time by an Indigenous Iruaté man.
Nine years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) is now widely known as a “miracle” and a faith healer, heavily promoted by her missionary father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido). As the girl eagerly participates in tent revival sermons, two events occur disrupting the long-established routine.
First, a new nurse, Denise (Sabine Timoteo), arrives and suddenly starts questioning the details Rebecca knows about her past. Then, there is the pressing matter of rising tensions between the Iruaté tribe and the loggers destroying their land, and both Lawrence and Rebecca insert themselves into this conflict.
Transamazonia, which premiered at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in August and then made its US debut at the 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival, is the fourth feature film by South African-born director Pia Marais. Her previous works -- both scripted and non-fiction -- concerned the complexity of human nature in a variety of circumstances, and the new one piles on this unspoken narrative. At the core of the new movie is a coming-of-age story that seems both familiar and not.
From early on, it’s clear that the clash between the two worlds isn’t merely a background to Rebecca’s struggles for self-identity, it’s actually in the heart of those. Even before the girl’s worldview is turned upside down by some novel facts, she is already torn by the duality of her circumstances.
On one hand, she eagerly participates in her father’s performances, serving as the headliner and main attraction. On the other, her already mixed feelings about Lawrence's loud Gospel preaching to the Iruaté gradually grow even more complicated.
Helena Zengel, who already has several memorable character parts on her resume, thanks to System Crasher (2019) and News of the World (2020), hits a new level with Rebecca, a role primarily painted with a quiet but expressive power. Playing her father Lawrence, Jeremy Xido exudes dubiousness, coming across as a character from Claire Denis’ or Werner Herzog’s body of work; it's a complicated figure, verging between a conman and an man obsessed, thrown in the middle of a colonial rift.
Both Lawrence and Rebecca, as well as their complex family dynamic, serve as the emotional tentpoles here, but it’s probably worth mentioning that Transamazonia is a film some viewers might find hard to connect with. Things happen here and the stakes are high, but the plot is decidedly sparce, while Marais leads the narrative with purely cinematic resources.
With Mathieu De Montgrand’s cinematography, the rainforest comes alive with many closeups of insects and constant splashes of light trying to penetrate the darkness, and the land becomes its own character, the most important one, compensating for all the others that the authors seem to intentionally keep at arm's length.
The film screened at this year's edition of the New York Film Festival.