ABSTRACT
The most striking features of Brazilian film culture over the course of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the shift in representation of indigenous peoples on screen. Most fictional films produced in Brazil since Descobrimento do Brasil have displayed a similar preference for depicting “first contact Indians” through the centuries. This is likely as a result of the “dumb intellectual inertia of Eurocentric trap concepts such as ‘authenticity’, ‘tradition/modernity’ and ‘real Indians’”. Charlotte Gleghorn’s claim that Video nas Aldeias films are made by indigenous filmmakers for internal consumption is only partially true. Terra vermelha is a fiction film relating the difficulties facing the Guarani-Kaiowa which was jointly developed with the indigenous population and casts them in the principal roles of the film. As Vicente Carelli poignantly observed in voiceover in Martirio, “It is in the treatment of the indigenous population that Brazilian society is revealed”.
