Iracema, uma transa amazônica

Indigenous teenager Iracema has left her family and is barely surviving by working as a prostitute in the city of Belém do Pará. She meets Tião Brasil Grande, an unscrupulous truck driver with a big mouth who is an apologist for the Brazilian economic miracle and military dictatorship. A small timer nonetheless, he is passing along the newly constructed Trans-Amazonian Highway and making a living from illegal hardwood. Initially, he takes Iracema with him, before then leaving her to her brutal fate. This Cinema Novo highlight is a documentary/fiction hybrid road movie whose narrative unfolds in tandem with the devastation wrought by neocolonial-tinged extractivist capitalism. The film was made in an area of the Amazonas which was a national security zone under strict military control at the time. Iracema is a piercing guerilla trip through a reality that still exists to this day: expulsion, forest fires, deforestation, slavery and child prostitution. The ones to suffer most here were and are the Indigenous population, girls and women. World premiere of the restored version by Montanha Russa Cinematográfica.