With the title ‘Eu sou uma arara’, a celebrated expression used by the Bororo people who inhabit the state of Mato Grosso (Brazil), this essay-film, made by Rivane Neuenschwander and Mariana Lacerda, which stands somewhere between document and fiction, is the result of a long period of research and a series of actions that took place in São Paulo. The group paraded in the streets, like a dense and potent forest, with dozens of characters dressed like the Brazilian fauna and flora, as a way of turning people’s attention to environmental destruction and the genocide of Indigenous people. The first action happened on October 2, 2021, as part of a demonstration known as Bolsonaro Out — in the midst of the pandemic, precisely when it became more and more urgent to take to the streets. Since then, the group of activists, artists and friends who have joined the movement, wearing outfits of animals, plants, fungi and several other elements from the many biomes that inhabit the country, became larger in terms of number and complexity, bringing color and excitement to the several demonstrations that took place over the past year. They collaborated to create banners, flyers, and accessories to go with the outfits created by the artist from a panoply of re-used and improvised materials, imbuing the events with spirituality, as well as an aesthetic and political potency. They occupied both real and virtual spaces.
In our panorama of environmental and climate urgency, a politics of genocide was being denounced through the presence of these animals, as a reminder that we are on a path towards the self-destruction of humanity. Proposing an interaction between society, nature, and ecology, and significantly contributing to the cultural and symbolic enrichment of the processes that are inherent to social struggle, the film bears witness to the highly pressurized moment that Brazil was going through just before the presidential elections.