Directed by Nathan Grossman
Sweden, Denmark, France | 2026 | Documentary | 93 min | Portuguese, Korubo, Swedish, English, French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by Anonymous
Saturday, October 17 | 12:15 PM | BB
Thursday, October 22 | 7:15 PM | BB
This labyrinthine documentary interrogates the 1996 expedition of Sydney Possuelo, an enterprising adventurer who led a journey deep into the Brazilian Amazon in search of the elusive and much-mythologized Korubo tribe. The first half is an expertly assembled found-footage journey, tracking the crew’s movements into the jungle. This B-roll features all the ugliness one might expect on the margins, and Possuelo even gets his Fitzcarraldo moment, blasting Strauss from the boat on his boombox. Eventually, they make first contact, and it’s tense and abstract in ways that are challenging to untangle. But the second half of the movie tries, heading back into the heart of the Amazon with Erling Söderström, a journalist and filmmaker who was basically second in command on the first expedition, as well as Brazilian anthropologist Barbara Arisi, to discover the ramifications thirty years later. In the decades since, Söderström became something of a self-styled Nigel Thornberry type, parlaying the expedition to diminishing notoriety. Diving headlong down the rabbit hole of colonialist exploitation, Nathan Grossman’s Amazomania is a mesmerizing takedown. ~OO