Uaicurapa

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Note of intent

Didier d’Abreu was born in São Paulo, in 1988. After majoring in Philosophy and History, he directed his first short film Dona Morte in 2010. His second short, Par ce chemin descendent les ombres, premiered in competition at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, in Montréal. He is currently writing his first feature film, Monument Valley, and finishing a documentary co-produced by Ciné+, Casting.

Synopsis

In the region of the Uaicurapá river, at the center of the Brazilian Amazon, men and women of different ages claim they were attacked by a “boto”. It is said that those pink river dolphins can metamorphose into human beings at nightfall to seduce the locals, and sometimes even kidnap them to their underwater city. Wherever and whenever they show up, they leave a trace of unwanted pregnancies, panic attacks and mysterious disappearances. The film will a collect a few of those stories, and try to patch up the portrait of a small fishermen’s community in present-day Amazonia — of its particular geography, the feeling of time, of its daily routine and material resources, which govern the relationship between its people and the world, between the people among themselves, and which stirs the imagination, making the very existence of those creatures possible.

Visual concept

The film will glean personal stories told by those who’ve seen or felt the presence of a boto. We will watch them recall those memories at length, in the most common situations and places of everyday life. We will follow the digressions, the uncertainties and the speech-blunders, that reveal the pleasure or the pain those stories can conjure up. We will learn little by little what powers the creature can summon, the places where it shows up from time to time, the people who’ve felt its touch.