{"id":227950,"date":"2025-10-27T09:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T09:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/227950\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T09:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T09:55:08","slug":"canutos-transformation-review-did-a-man-really-turn-into-a-jaguar-in-brazils-remote-forest-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/227950\/","title":{"rendered":"Canuto\u2019s Transformation review \u2013 did a man really turn into a jaguar in Brazil\u2019s remote forest? | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a complex, mysterious docufictional mediation which unfolds at an unhurried walking pace, co-authored by the Indigenous Brazilian film-maker Ariel Kuaray Ortega, a member of the Mby\u00e1-Guarani movie collective; it\u2019s evidently been a personal project, many years in the making, and a prizewinner at the 2023 IDFA festival in Amsterdam. Ortega returns to his home town in a remote forested region on the border with Argentina<\/a>, on a mission to investigate a local legend that a man called Canuto, from his grandfather\u2019s generation, was transformed into a jaguar.<\/p>\n

The film is at once a documentary on this subject and a record of the fictional re-enactment that Ortega is staging using local people \u2013 and, in a way, it is a film about itself. He speaks to his aged grandfather and to villagers about their customs and beliefs and their fraught relationship with the military tyranny of the time; it was a period notorious for the <\/a>desaparecidos<\/a> \u2013 the \u201cdisappeared\u201d<\/a> \u2013 which provides an enigmatic political context for Canuto\u2019s vanishing and the authorities who appropriated their lands without compensation. There are also sharp comments on a certain high-handed \u201cwhite architect\u201d who designed an award-winning wooden community centre for them, which the community itself regards as exasperatingly flimsy and unfit for purpose, and which they plan to break up for lumber.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The film works in a kind of real-time immersive way, showing scenes in the community at unbroken length . So: does anyone appearing on camera fully believe that Canuto was transformed into a jaguar? Or is the whole idea mysticalised and relativised to such an extent that we question our assumptions about every aspect of asking that question? It could be that Canuto met a horrible end, political or otherwise, and the \u201cjaguar\u201d myth was devised by the collective hivemind to process their shock and grief. It\u2019s an intriguing study.<\/p>\n

Canuto\u2019s Transformation is on True Story from 31 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here is a complex, mysterious docufictional mediation which unfolds at an unhurried walking pace, co-authored by the Indigenous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-227950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}