Iracema

Shot along the freshly carved Trans-Amazonian Highway in the early years of Brazil’s dictatorship—a showcase project sold as national destiny—Iracema captured a country violently remaking itself through state-backed “development” and the accelerating destruction of the Amazon, including some of the earliest filmed images of the forest burning. An Indigenous teenager drifts into Belém do Pará, scraping by as a sex worker, and falls in with Tião Brasil Grande, a swaggering trucker who parrots the regime’s optimism while hauling contraband hardwood through a forest disappearing in real time. Their uneasy bond becomes a road movie through a ravaged landscape, where “progress” reveals itself as displacement. With unsparing clarity, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna expose the extractive logic driving the dictatorship’s grand projects, which led to the film’s banning by the military government.

Restoration production and technical coordination by Alice de Andrade; produced by Montanha Russa Cinematográfica; Artistic Director Jorge Bodanzky; image restoration by Cinegrell; sound restoration by José Luiz Sasso, JLS Studios; restoration supervisors Débora Butruce and Martin Köerber; with support from CTAV, Mnemosine, IMS, PUC-Rio, Instituto Guimarães Rosa, and Cinemateca Brasileira.