‘The Falling Sky’: Cannes Review

Dirs. Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha. Brazil, Italy. 2024. 110mins. 

Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha’s immersive documentary opens with an unbroken seven-minute shot during which, framed by the mountainous terrain, a Brazilian tribe of males, girls and kids march in direction of the lens over a dust path. As they arrive nearer into view, their canines, backpacks, bows, spears and shotguns turn into extra seen — and their singing grows louder. Finally they arrive so near the digicam that they take over the body, their presence wholly enveloping the viewer. The Falling Sky thrives on these unflinching stares from a neighborhood devoted to a heritage presently below risk. 

A revealing and irritating expertise

Premiering in Administrators’ Fortnight, the keenly observational, slow-burning political needs of The Falling Sky makes it interesting for socially aware audiences. Impressed by the ebook of the identical identify by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa (who seems within the movie) and French anthropologist Bruce Albert, what’s billed as a collaboration between the Yanomami and Watoriki communities is a revealing and irritating expertise – one which recollects The Territory (2022), one other Brazilian documentary a couple of tribe combating encroaching industrialists. Technically immaculate and marked by sensorial storytelling, it’s additionally a movie whose simple fashion can overwork the straightforward message it desires to inform. 

The movie’s arresting title derives from a neighborhood apocalyptic delusion of the sky actually falling, and the xapiri spirits who not solely hoisted it again however are nonetheless holding it immediately. It’s as much as the shamans to talk to them. To honour the passing of his father-in-law, who died one 12 months earlier, shaman Davi Kopenawa holds a Reahu feast. However there’s a fair graver air hanging over this commemoration. The shamans are additionally hoping they will name on these spirits to drive again the miners who’re deforesting the land

Neatly, Rocha and Cunha by no means minimize away from the Indigenous perspective to get a view of the oncoming industrialists. As a substitute, the filmmakers look to the surroundings — polluted water, caustic smoke, the sounds of planes flying overhead — that has begun to creep into the bucolic setting.  

For these Indigenous individuals, this isn’t new. At one level, one of many shamans decries the assorted colonial forces — from the USA, Spain, Portugal, Japan and France — who, at numerous factors in Brazil’s historical past, have tried to grab the land.  The shamans additionally discuss land that was taken away in 1973 to construct highways. And but, via the movie’s piercing mixture of sound and Watoriki music, which paints a wealthy image of the battle between custom and modernity raging within the very wind that surrounds them, you get the sense that this new problem is certainly their gravest battle.

The gravity of the state of affairs iis additionally felt within the lengthy takes employed by editor Renato Vallone. Capturing the tribe’s rituals – dancing, face portray, meals making – is as a lot about visually holding onto these sights earlier than they completely disappear as it’s about giving these Indigenous individuals house to inform their very own story. The tribe additionally communicates with surrounding communities by VHF radios. Generally these conversations are mundane; at different factors, they observe fast-moving disasters, similar to circumstances of malaria and widespread pneumonia brought on by the deteriorating surroundings.   

For all its thematic heft, nevertheless, The Falling Sky’s effectiveness is usually blunted by its overwhelming fashion. In direction of the tip of the movie, Rocha and Cunha minimize to grey-scaled footage of pure disasters: earthquakes, flooding, the falling glaciers. However such montages have turn into clichéd. In such a thoughtfully conceived movie, the approach feels much more trite. Moreover, the superb line between deliberate pacing and being ponderously inert is usually blurred because the filmmakers attempt to steadiness explaining the disaster and capturing this lifestyle, within the course of inflicting every thread to dangle.

This, however, is an uncompromising movie, one that doesn’t bend into didacticism. You would simply think about a model of this documentary that handholds the viewer, both by making white encroachers a bodily and visible presence or by delivering reams of captioned info. However Rocha and Cunha aren’t making an attempt to present viewers such consolation. Quite they’re asking audiences to see, hear and really feel the world from the vantage level of the Yanomami and Watoriki individuals. Such undaunted filmmaking, even when drawn out, renders The Falling Sky as pressing as its title calls for.