Yõg Ãtak: My Father, Kaiowá is an essential documentary project constructed in four movements commencing with the first contact via video-letter between Brazilian indigenous co-filmmaker Sueli Maxakali and her father Luis Kaiowá, a shaman, whom she has never met.
Why? Because they were forcibly parted by the Brazilian military dictatorship when she was a very young girl. The second and third movements detail the preparation for an epic 3-day odyssey to effect the long-awaited reunion, and the fourth records her eventual return home to her Village-School-Forest.
The film is, in essence, about the joining together of two kins, the Maxakali and the Kaiowá, after a half century of separation, and dovetails with the acclaimed This Land is Our Land! (2020) also directed by Romero and Sueli, together with Isael Maxakali and Carolina Canguçumade, which addresses the desolation of the Brazilian rain forests and spiritual indigenous homelands.
As physically challenging as the production seemed of Yõg Ãtak: My Father, Kaiowá seemed, the resilience of the personnel involved determined that it would succeed. “I think that we overcame the difficulties mostly because of a great team that was really eager to make Sueli’s dream come true, to meet her father,” says director Romero. The third director on My Father is Luisa Lanna, an editor, educator and film producer, working mainly with indigenous communities in Brazil. “Part of this team already had a huge experience with the Kaiowá people, as anthropologists and filmmakers. So I think that that helped a lot. And we had in our team indigenous people from both [Kaiowá and Maxakali].”
“To make a film in this context…there must be a very delicate political negotiation with the community, with the people,” adds Romero. “Sueli is part of that people, even though she had never been there before. But when we arrived there and when they met, they automatically identified her as kin.”
Why does Romero believe this film to be of such key importance? “It’s not just Sueli’s personal life story of being separated from her father, and her subsequent contact with him. This story tells much about Brazilian history and the Brazilian dictatorship. In Brazil, the history of dictatorship is not very widely told, especially in relation to its indigenous victims. This is a chapter of history that is completely forgotten.”
The project is budgeted at €120,000 of which €100,000 has been sourced. The mooted delivery date is July 2023. Romero says that he is seeking co-production partners to meet a particular emotional and cinematic objective, to return to Brazil and film the long-awaited gathering and reunion of the wider Maxakali and the Kaiowá clans.
