Claude Lévi-Strauss - Auprès de l'Amazonie (2009)

The eminent French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) dedicated some of the most poetic passages of his influential Tristes Tropiques (1955) to the Nambikwara Indians with whom he lived in 1938. Seventy years after, Marcelo Fortaleza Flores' film weaves past and present together through revisiting the same villages where the anthropologist lived while exploring others that have been contacted since. Interviews with Lévi-Strauss and Tito Wakalitesu (the only Nambikwara Indian who remembers the 1938 expedition), rare archival footage filmed by Lévi-Strauss, scenes of Marechal Rondon's expedition (1907-1915), Rio Papagaio and the Utiarity falls, along with the many aspects of the lives of Namikwara Indians present a vivid portrayal of today against the backdrop of the mutual reminisces of Lévi-Strauss and the Nambikwara.