Uýra - A Retomada da Floresta (Uýra: The Rising Forest)

Uýra - A Retomada da Floresta (Uýra: The Rising Forest), dir. Juliana Curi, 2022, Brazil/USA, 63m., in Portuguese with full English subtitles 🙂

Wednesday, June 22, 2022, 8:30pm New Parkway World premiere

Winner: Amazon Audience Award, Best Documentary

Self-described non-binary LGBT performance artist Emerson, descendant of both colonial miners and the indigenous people they displaced, has created an alter-ego, Uýra Sodoma, an indigenous, queer, trans person living on the outskirts of Manaus, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Uýra travels throughout the Amazon, visiting indigenous villages to share ancestral knowledge of both nature and culture, in the midst of a horrible political situation under the Trumpian presi­dent Jair Bolsonaro, whose government is utterly dismissive of both indigenous cultures and ecological concerns, with policy guided by the economic bottom line.

Unfortunately, the documentary often lags, most notably in the last 15 minutes of the film, which are almost entirely closing credits, which is a lot for a film that’s under an hour. Uýra is a look into a corner of the forest that refuses to be forgotten, but I found it only intermittently engaging. Recommended.

• IMDb page • Official website • Trailer •