Petra Costa’s new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics explores the “fatal marriage” between Christian nationalism and authoritarian politics
South American Media
In this interview on Under the Flags, the Sun, Paraguayan director Juanjo Pereira discusses completing his archival excavation of former President
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from directors Vickie Curtis and Doug Anderson’s 'Comparsa'(2025). Is is the story of teenage sisters Lesli and Lupe in Ciudad Peronia, Guatemala as they rally other neighborhood teens to participate in a Comparsa, or series of performances similar to a carnival, to protest violence against women and children in their community.
Close to the start of her hypnotic documentary The Memory of Butterflies, director Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski describes the moment that inspired the film. While looking through a selection of propaganda images taken by a company operating in the Amazon during the late 19th-century rubber boom, Sadowski came across a posed portrait of two young Indigenous men. In the image, the pair stands hand in hand dressed in Western clothes, stiff suits and ties, gazing at the camera with solemn, unreadable expressions: Omarino and Aredomi. Documentary spoke to Sadowski shortly after the film’s premiere at the Berlinale, where the documentary jury awarded the film a special mention, about the ethics of colonial archive, cinematic speculation, and sound as a threshold. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman’s environmental documentary We Are Guardians (2023), which kicks off a U.S. theatrical screening tour this Friday in Los Angeles. The film, produced by Academy Award winner Fischer Stevens’s Highly Flammable in collaboration with Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, is a comprehensive examination of the ongoing deforestation crisis in the Amazon Rainforest.
I first encountered the work of Milo Rau back in 2020, when his reimagining of the story of Jesus, The New Gospel, premiered in Venice. Set in the
At the bottom of page 49 in a 1993 edition of the fabled Argentine film magazine El Amante , there is a sidebar titled “Experimental Cinema,” written
Imagine the hallways of Cornell University, a quiet, comfortable campus in upstate New York, in the mid-1970s. Now imagine, in one of the Ivy League rooms, a Marxist reading group that brings together students and professors from different generations, ethnicities, and countries. They are united by an urgency to make revolutionary art and contribute to the dismantling of imperialist capitalism. This is the origin story of the Victor Jara Collective, a coalition of artists and activists named after the revolutionary Chilean musician assassinated during the Pinochet regime.
Morzaniel Ɨramari, an Indigenous documentary-maker from the Amazon rainforest, is traveling with his third film, Mãri Hi - The Tree of Dream, in order to raise awareness about his people’s current plight. He is the first filmmaker from among the Yanomami, an ethnic group of roughly 35,000 foraging agriculturalists stewarding a Nebraska-sized swathe of the Amazon, who live in equilibrium with nature. During Bolsonaro’s reign, through a calamitous combination of state neglect and an influx of illegal miners hungry for gold, the Yanomami suffered what President Lula da Silva terms “an attempted genocide.”
Since early 2020, the COVID pandemic has taken a merciless toll on film institutions and festivals around the world. But for Cinemateca Brasileira