In the documentary Amazomania, which just screened at the DC/DOX festival in the nation’s capital, vintage footage shows a Swedish filmmaker and journalist in what appears to be a jungle setting, tying on his worn boots. A machete is suspended within easy reach, its long blade thwacked into a wooden post.
Erling Söderström, the filmmaker-journalist, looks into the camera and declares, “We are a large troop of 26 men. Make or break, this is the last attempt to make contact with the Korubo. This has never been done before, that humans enter the Indians’ territory, land that they know very well, and try to contact them there.”
It’s a story often told in literature and film – the Western adventurer bent on reaching isolated tribes in the Amazon or elsewhere around the world. Söderström made several documentaries about his explorations, among them Jungle Club (1997) and The Hidden Tribes of the Amazon (2002).
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“When I grew up as like a kid, these kinds of documentaries were constantly on television,” relates Nathan Grossman, the Swedish-born director of Amazomania. “If you turned on Discovery Channel or NatGeo, anything could kind of come on.”
Roughly the first half of Amazomania is made up of raw footage that Söderström shot in 1996 as he went up the Amazon River toward the territory of the Korubo.
“I got a tip from a friend actually who had heard that this archive existed and had heard about [Söderström’s] work. If you talk to documentary commissioners of like the older age in the industry, they recognize and remember this,” Grossman tells Deadline. “I got access to all of the tapes to digitize them and see what was on the rushes and how did the rushes compare to the previous kinds of documentaries [Erling] had packaged. Because it was packaged in a few different ways. It was this acclaimed award-winning documentary [The Hidden Tribes of the Amazon] that went on French and German television, but there were also shorter things going on Swedish television as well.”
In an autobiographical statement on his website korubo.com, Söderström writes that he was accompanied on his 1996 journey by Sydney Possuelo, founder of Brazil’s Department for Isolated Indians and an expert on protecting Indigenous peoples in his country. In his statement, the Swedish journalist does not make mention of Possuelo’s misgivings about the upriver mission.
“Sydney’s a very strong character in Brazilian politics, and he’s a really firm believer of not making contact with Indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation. And I think some of that we see in the film is like this incredible doubt that he carries. I think he’s maybe the person in the film who at that time had the deepest understanding of what the consequences of a situation like this could lead to,” Grossman notes. “I think it’s very evident from the footage… what a tremendously hard decision it must have been to create an expedition like this and take this step.”
Ostensibly, the 1996 journey was meant to protect the Korubo from further outside contact by invaders (loggers, fishermen, settlers) intent on taking their resources. But Amazomania becomes an interrogation of the ethics of sending photographers and film crews into an area of isolated Indigenous people without asking their consent or giving them any say in what was filmed or how it was used.
“The film is really about the medialization of this specific event,” Grossman states. “The core theme of the film is very much me as a Swedish representative of the media looking at these practices and trying to create questions and lift that up the agenda.”
It’s not an academic question, confined to expeditions that remain safely in the past.
“There are over 200 Indigenous groups still living in voluntary isolation in the world. And I think that maybe many governments have updated their views and standards and how to kind of connect with the media. But sadly, I’m not sure how much the media necessarily has updated our kind of interest in this,” Grossman contends. “And I’m not talking about specifically the documentary community here. I’m talking about the news communities… I would be very doubtful today if a newspaper got the chance to follow an expedition like this, if they wouldn’t have said yes, and if they wouldn’t have gone very far in their kind of attempts to broadcast a situation like this.”
To wit, Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2020 posted a 1-minute video on YouTube titled “Footage of uncontacted tribesman in the Amazon rainforest,” with the helpful addendum, “The man is bare-chested and carrying a spear.” It’s one of countless videos and films of the sort on YouTube, some of them excerpted from footage by Söderström and adventurers like him.
Clearly, the “bare-chested man carrying a spear” was not consulted about whether he wished to be filmed or have his image posted to YouTube. Grossman notes that laws in the developed world favor “owners” of that kind of footage – meaning, the people who shot it.
“The film looks at all these moral layers, but also there’s this legal layer. The material rights laws of Europe and the U.S., they’re very strong. Erling has lots and lots of archive of other Indigenous groups as well. [The rights to] those archives, they lie with him. When copyright laws were created in various countries, these were not done with negotiations with Indigenous groups.”
By contrast, the Communidade Korubo are executive producers of Amazomania. Grossman says he consulted with them closely on the making of the documentary and the use of Söderström’s footage.
“Vetting the entire film, vetting all their arguments, vetting the archive to make sure that members of the community and the executive producers from the community kind of think that things are correctly portrayed, all of these steps have been done,” Grossman says. But he acknowledges, “Even everything we’ve done, there will be no perfect practices. There are always these kinds of power imbalances.”
In a “positionality statement” that accompanies press notes for the film, the Amazomania team states, “The project recognizes authorship, access to archives, translations, and editorial decision-making as forms of power. The filmmakers do not position themselves as neutral observers or arbiters of truth, a work is always shaped by selection, framing, and the context of where it is published.”
Söderström, who is about 70, appears in his archive footage in the film and in material Grossman shot much more recently. He comes off as defensive at times when challenged about how he has used the archive he shot of the Korubo. Yet he writes on his website, “I was part of the first team who made contact with the so-called ‘Korubo’ in 1996 but that was an emergency action, they were being massacred and moved in areas far from their traditional land.
“Exactly where these other communities live will remain a secret. We should leave them alone. Let’s just protect their land and their universe, the rainforest. They need the forest to survive and to live peacefully free and unknown. But they do not need us.”
Nonetheless, Söderström is “hoping to make more films in the region,” Grossman points out. Referring to the name of his film, Grossman observes, “The title clearly relates to that never ending mania or fascination for this place.”