BIRDWATCHERS/LA TERRA DEGLI UOMINI ROSSI – BIRDWATCHERS
Directed by Marco Bechis Club, Queen's, Belfast; IFI, Dublin, 108 min

FEW FILMS this year have had quite so arresting an opening sequence as does this campaigning film, set among the Guarani- Kaiowá tribe of western Brazil.

A group of tourists (on a daytrip to Conradland, perhaps) are boating through the jungle when they encounter some tribespeople lurking enigmatically on the riverbank. The natives fire a few arrows lazily into the water, then head into the forest where, after pulling on T-shirts and accepting a small wad of cash from the tour organisers, board a truck for their dilapidated reservation.

The irony is delicious. Even as you sneer at the travellers’ gullibility, you remain uncomfortably aware that, by sitting down to watch a film in which genuine Guarani-Kaiowá play versions of themselves, you are involving yourself in another act of cultural tourism.

Unfortunately, nothing else in Birdwatchersquite matches the bitter irony and dark humour of this scene. The film goes on to deal with the interactions between the tribe and a local landowner who is turning the forest into farmland.

One of the elder tribesmen organises an occupation of the land while a teenager, possessed by visions, is seduced by ancient myths and delusions. The farmer’s two daughters, stereotypically shallow and insensitive, make occasional, inappropriate contact with contemporaries in the forest, as their father plots to scare the tribal protesters back to the reservation.

Marco Bechis, a director of Chilean and Italian descent, finds beautiful things at which to point his camera, and he draws relaxed performances from the nonprofessional members of his cast. Yet this somewhat schematically plotted film remains mired in didacticism and finger- wagging throughout. Stock characters are forever laying out the issues and comparing the merits of progress and tradition.

A later scene appears to tip the hat to Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, but, though fired with righteous anger, Birdwatchersnever quite manages the poetic grace of that film.

Still, the picture does put its case forcefully, and the campaigning messages over the end credits should spur interest in a cause worth caring about. You are clearly a decent fellow, Mr Bechis.