/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/FILM-BRAZIL: ‘Taina’ Defends Nature and Children’s Cinema

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 6 2001 (IPS) - The loneliness of Tainá, an indigenous girl in the middle of Brazil’s seemingly infinite Amazon forests, only grew worse with the death of her elderly Uncle Gé, but she inherited from her people a courageous heart and a wealth of knowledge about nature – both of which help her survive.

These strengths also aid her in her mission to fight biological pirating and the trafficking of wild animals, perpetrated by foreigners with the complicity of local groups, according to the movie ‘Tainá: uma aventura na Amazonia’ (Tainá: An Adventure in the Amazon), the most recent attempt to promote Brazilian children’s film through truly national themes.

In her struggles, Tainá comes across an unexpected ally, a boy from the big city who is addicted to computer games and McDonald’s hamburgers, meaning he is completely out of his element in a village located on a river in the Amazon forest.

The boy is there because his mother, a scientist, is researching a vaccine for a tropical disease – another matter that awakens the greed of modern pirates who seek to profit from local knowledge and from the region’s wild animals.

Such opposite lifestyles lead to a culture clash between the two children, but it doesn’t prevent Tainá from thwarting the smugglers, getting Brazil’s environmental police to put them behind bars.

‘Tainá’, directed by Tania Lamarca, was released for the Southern Hemisphere summer in an attempt to meet the demands of a young audience; an arena generally monopolised by US-made films, such as the inevitable Walt Disney productions, and more recently by the Japanese ‘Pokemon’.

Her efforts have been rewarded with a first prize at the Rio International Film Festival and resounding success at the New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Lamarca has paid close attention to the splendour of images of the Amazon’s seemingly endless forests and rivers; the enchantment of the animals, whose gestures serve as commentary on human actions; the jungle’s exuberant life and its power to stimulate the imagination of anyone who experiences it.

The film’s high quality camera-work makes great use of these natural resources, cultivating comical and unusual situations that captivate young viewers and adults alike, such as the city boy lost in the jungle, or bandits being bombarded with coconuts thrown from a seaplane.

Not only is indigenous knowledge of nature honoured through the character of Tainá, but her young friend from the city proves able to pilot the seaplane thanks to his intensive training on computer games.

“That was the part I liked best,” commented one eight-year-old moviegoer as he left the movie-theatre.

The story is straightforward, as children’s films usually are, but younger viewers probably lack the sophistication to understand the references to scientific piracy, or to local wisdom that foreigners patent in their own countries, taking over the intellectual property rights that justifiably belong in the hands of the peoples living in the Amazon.

It may have been simpler to stick to the denunciation of smuggling of wild animals, a business that some estimates put at more than 20 billion dollars annually worldwide, surpassed only by arms and drug trafficking, among illegal trade.

Brazil is one of the major exporters in the illegal market of wild animals, covering 15 percent, according to Dener Giovani, director of the National Network to Combat Animal Trafficking, a non-governmental organisation that operates in partnership with Brazil’s environmental authorities.

The species threatened with extinction are the ones that fetch the highest prices, according to experts – up to 200,000 dollars for the ‘arara azul’ (hyacinthine macaw), a bird inhabiting Brazil’s Atlantic coast, of which there are only a handful left.

In ‘Tainá’, a monkey facing extinction, and hunted by a group of bio-pirates, though protected by the indigenous girl, serves as the axis of the film’s story. According to the plot, a US-based company has offered 10,000 dollars for the animal.

Lamarca’s production has been an attempt during the summer vacation here to play the role that last year went to ‘Castillo Ra-Tim-Bum’, a children’s film that was considered important for the Brazilian industry. In reality, it was a high quality adaptation of a TV series broadcast by a public network.

The Brazilian-made movies that are most successful at the box office are usually targeted at children, but have retail and entertainment goals beyond the big screen. Their protagonists include the popular children’s programme hostess Xuxa and the comic group ‘Trapalhdes’.

The relatively low turnout to see ‘Tainá’ in theatres in Rio de Janeiro seems to indicate that the movie-going public continues to prefer films that focus solely on entertainment, which are generally US-made, and not on heavier issues like the preservation of the environment and of indigenous knowledge.