Mirrors 2021
Uaká
Paula Gaitán I 1988 I 78'
SYNOPSIS
In the middle of the Brazilian jungle lies the Xingu, a region unknown to outsiders until twenty years ago. Uaká is a "poem of images" about the Kuarup ritual, a tribute to the dead. An ancient culture that continues to live according to its own legends.
BIOGRAPHY
Paula Gaitán
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PAULA GAITÁN is a Colombian-Brazilian director born in Paris in 1954. After collaborating with her husband Glauber Rocha on several films, she made her feature debut with Uaká (1988). Since then, she has directed more than a dozen films, including the monumental Luz nos Tropicos (2020).
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Critical text
Paula Gaitán started in film as a Glauber Rocha’s collaborator in the late 1970s and is an experienced filmmaker with a career as a director spanning more than thirty years. Uaká, released in 1988, is her first feature film, a deep immersion into the life and traditions of an Amazonian tribe. This ethnographic documentary accompanies and observes the customs of one of Brazil’s ancestral civilisations, at a time when the westernisation of native peoples was gaining more and more ground. The power of this people’s culture overflows in Gaitán’s images. Uaká is clearly a film made out of desire and holds an ambition for diversity, which History has tried to deny. NURIA CUBAS
Technical Sheet
Dirección:
Paula Gaitán
Guion:
Paula Gaitán
Intervenciones de:
Takuman, Ianaculá, Sapaim
Fotografía:
Johnny Howard
