Film
TRAILER: This Brazilian Film Is an Ecological Thriller About Indigenous Rights, Women’s Rights & Deforestation


Courtesy of Strand Releasing
By Manuel Betancourt | 3 weeks ago

Watching the first few minutes of the latest trailer for the Brazil-set film Sequestrada, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a documentary. “Before my father,” an indigenous woman says as we see an Amazon landscape that looks untouched, “there were only 56 Arara.” Flashing before us are images of the day-to-day life of the Arara today: kids playing with a small boar, two young girls hacking away at a coconut, a couple rowing away on a canoe. But that life is about to change: they’re all slowly being displaced. The reason for such resettlement soon becomes clear: a dam is about to built in the area, which means that families who have lived in the Amazon basin for generations are now being treated as interlopers.

Directed by climate-change expert and producer Sabrina McCormick, and codirected by Korean filmmaker Soopum Sohn, Sequestrada focuses on three separate but interconnected stories. One follows a young Arara girl called Kamodjara (Kamodjara Xipaia) intent on protesting the dam who gets kidnapped by traffickers. Another follows Roberto (Marcelo Olinto), an indigenous agency bureaucrat overseeing a report that could change everything, and who finds himself under pressure to support the dam’s construction. The last follows Thomas (Tim Blake Nelson), an American investor in the dam who makes his way to Brazil to sway Roberto’s opinion.

Shot on location in Brazil, based on the real-life events behind the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, and featuring a number of nonprofessional actors, Sequestrada is an ecological thriller that wants to do more than tell a story. It wants to energize its viewers to realize the way fights for climate change, for indigenous rights, and for women’s rights aren’t mutually exclusive fights but deeply intertwined issues that ripple from the Amazon out onto the entire world. Check out the full trailer.

KAMODJARA and her father, CRISTIANO, leave their Amazonian reservation to protest a dam displacing her people. She gets separated and kidnapped by traffickers. ROBERTO, a high-level bureaucrat in the indigenous agency goes to the Amazon to help the tribes. THOMAS, a major American investor in the dam, goes to make sure the dam is approved. Roberto arrives in the Amazon and requests a prostitute. He is given Kamodjara. She is desperate to find her family again, and Roberto offers to help her. As Thomas gets embroiled in trouble with the indigenous people, Kamodjara begins to realize that Roberto doesn’t actually intend to return her to her family and she must escape.

CAST

Tim Blake Nelson
Kamodjara Xipaia
Marcelo Olinto
Gretchen Mol

SEQUESTRADA

"Gorgeously shot and thought-provoking, it’s a fast paced atmospheric drama, a brilliant collaborative work." - Roger Costa, Brazilian Press 

“Tim Blake Nelson and Gretchen Mol figure into this thriller, which concerns the impact of development of the Brazilian Amazon on the environment and on the life of an indigenous tribe.” - New York Times