Cast of "Birdwatchers" (La Terra Degli Uomini Rossi)

There were but very few movies that lighted up the Venice Film Festival this summer. Marco Bechis' riveting look at a native Indian tribe in Brazil in his latest "Birdwatchers," lifted sagging spirits. Despair and cynicism faded away, and certain joy de vivre emerged. Politically correct, well constructed, the movie, though, missed out on one essential cinematic ingredient. Even in its most emotionally high moments, the characters failed to connect with viewers. Ultimately, I think a film ought to touch one's heart, and I wonder why Bechis, the Italio-Chilean who had forcefully tackled the Argentine dictatorship in "Garage Olimpo" slipped in his narrative of the Guaranis, the clan whose story he paints on his cinematic canvas.

The other names for them can well be loss, deprivation and humiliation. "Birdwatchers" opens with an awesome shot of the Brazilian rainforest, and the camera pans to what seems to be lifelike statutes of topless women and almost naked men. On a closer look, we understand that they are posing on a river bank for birdwatching tourists sailing along. Once the boat disappears, the men and women quickly wear their jeans and t-shirts and collect their "wages" from the wife of a white ranch owner who uses them as a tourist attraction in her Nature talks. The disgrace does not end there: pushed out of their ancestral land and struggling to live off a dwindling supply of birds and animals, the Guaranis have no choice but to work sugarcane fields as underpaid day labourers. A few rebel against the displacement. Some pitch tents and camp on what is now the ranch owner's property. One young Guarani beds the owner's daughter, a Guarani woman sexually enslaves a white guard asked to keep watch over the campers. A few of the tribe hang themselves as yet another form of protest.

Bechis tells me at Venice during a freewheeling chat that believes in a cinema that goes beyond entertainment. Comparing himself to a Renaissance artist, he says "I never think about entertaining my viewers. I would rather encourage them to think through a message." "Birdwatchers" has one indeed.

The Guaranis of Brazil have lost almost all their land, taken through wile and violence by white farmers and ranchers. The land has been deforested and used as farms and ranches, robbing the natives of their food and an existence they have known for decades. In the past 20 years, tens of Indians have killed themselves, while the white men have grown richer, cultivating sugarcane and running ethanol distilleries. The cane — produced on what was once Guarani land — goes into making ethanol in a country where most cars run on it. Brazil hopes to be the top ethanol exporter by 2010, an economic boom that would emerge from the devastated dreams of a simple folk.

"Birdwatchers" may not change anything radically, but Bechis thinks that it can be one more weapon in the hands of the Guaranis to fight for their rights, to try and build a semblance of sanity out of their graveyard of distress. "My work can produce a minor social tremor in Brazil and Surinam, the only two South American countries that do not recognise the Indians' right over their own lands."