“I Am Greta” director Nathan Grossman revisits a 1996 expedition into Brazil’s Amazon, hailed at the time for its rare images of an isolated Indigenous community, in his new film “Amazomania,” which premieres at CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival.
The film draws on more than 60 hours of archival footage shot during the expedition by Swedish adventure journalist Erling Söderström, who traveled into the remote Javari Valley in the hope of making contact with the Korubo people. Nearly three decades later, Grossman returns to the material to examine not just the encounter but how the story was framed.
“Amazomania”
Courtesy of Erling Soderstrom
The Swedish director, best known for his 2020 award-winning documentary about climate activist Greta Thunberg, first came across the material during the pandemic.
“I got a tip from a friend who said that he had heard there was this archive that existed with a Swedish adventure journalist just a few hours from where I live. I went down and met with Erling, and he told me the story,” he explained.
Grossman struck an agreement with Söderström to digitize the tapes and explore what they contained – without knowing what story might emerge. What he eventually discovered was a gap between how the expedition had been portrayed and what the raw material revealed.
“I saw a discrepancy between how the material was presented before and what I saw in the rushes, because a lot of things had been left on the cutting room floor in relation to how it was presented in the early 2000s compared to what was on the tapes.”
Working with members of the Korubo community and anthropologist Barbara Arisi, Grossman uncovered previously untranslated conversations between the Indigenous tribe and the expedition team revealing misunderstandings that could have had deadly consequences.
One of Grossman’s key editorial decisions in “Amazomania” is to present much of the original footage largely unmediated in the first half of the film, immersing viewers in the same sense of exploration and discovery that shaped the earlier storytelling before challenging it. The second half follows Söderström as he returns on an expedition to the Amazon more than 25 years later, which doesn’t go quite as he had hoped.
The title of the film refers to a term Grossman and his team coined to describe the enduring fascination outsiders have with the region.
“[‘Amazomania’] is like a time capsule. Many people in the West carry a certain lust for that adventure story,” Grossman says. “But I think it is good also to examine what the repercussions and ramifications are. We let viewers feel that thirst for adventure and then we also let them look critically at it.”
For the filmmaker, the approach reflects a broader fascination many Western audiences still have with stories of adventure and discovery. The film ultimately questions how those narratives are constructed and who they serve.
“Why had no one ever talked to this group about what they said? Why was their perspective lacking here?,” asks Grossman. “Of course, that was very central for me: to give the Korubo members access to this so they could hear their own and their parents’ voices.”
Questioned about the inherent contradiction of revisiting such material in his own film, Grossman says the Korubo community executive produced it and are entitled to half of its proceeds. Even so, he does not present that arrangement as satisfying.
“I don’t think that is complete and enough. I hope that in 30 years the Korubo community will have access to this footage themselves and will be able to make something out of it,” he says. The rights to the original archive currently remain with Söderström.
The question takes on an added urgency given the fragile reality facing isolated Indigenous communities, he says. “There are around 200 Indigenous groups still living in voluntary isolation today. Sadly, there will be more contact events, despite policies to avoid it. When the natural world falters, those events take place.”
Which raises uncomfortable questions about how such encounters should be documented in the future: “Do we need a CNN team going in and live-streaming one of those events?,” asks Grossman. “I’m curious about how people will look at that after seeing the film.”
Co-produced by SVT with support from the Swedish Film Institute, the Danish Film Institute, DR, and co-funded by the European Union, “Amazomania” has its world premiere at CPH:DOX on March 16.
The festival runs in Copenhagen until March 22.
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