Movies and TV Shows

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Amazonas, Maior Rio do Mundo (Amazon: Longest River in the World)was stolen from the original director, Silvino Santos, shortly after it was made in 1918.

Featuring fascinating footage of the Amazon forest’s diverse landscapes and inhabitants – including some of the earliest known moving images of the Indigenous Witoto people – the feature-length film “mixes different dimensions of the documentary genre into a very enjoyable narrative for the viewer”, explains Stoco, a professor of visual arts at the federal university of Pará in Belém.

Santos takes his audience on a remarkably detailed journey through the Amazon, alternating close-up shots of caimans, jaguars and tropical flora with footage of Indigenous rituals and longer sequences showcasing the region’s extractive industries: rubber, the Brazil nut, timber, fishing, even the egret feathers that were a staple of women’s fashion at the time.

The lost documentary gained mythical status in Brazil with the story of its disappearance, which was recorded by Santos in an unpublished memoir written shortly before his death in 1969.

Instead Saraiva pocketed the print, claimed he was the director, and fraudulently signed a deal with Gaumont to distribute the film in England, where it was retitled Wonders of the Amazon.

“[He] couldn’t talk about the atrocities that were taking place,” Stoco says, arguing that the film remains important precisely for its perspective of the Amazon as “a region to be exploited” – a view that continues to drive the devastation of the rainforest and its native populations today.

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