March 19, 2025
Please join us for a screening of the 2020 documentary Searching for Makunaíma (Por Onde Anda Makunaíma), directed by Rodrigo Séllos, this Thursday, March 20 at 7pm in 142 Dwinelle.
Searching for Makunaíma (2020) is a documentary film tracing Brazil’s most famous fictional character, writer Mário de Andrade’s modernist hero, Macunaíma, to his origins as Makunaíma, a mythic ancestor of Indigenous people in the northern Amazon. 84 min. Watch the trailer here.
The screening is part of the graduate course "Mapping Macunaíma," taught by Macunaíma translator Katrina Dodson.
Below is a longer description of the movie by Dylan Blau Edelstein for the Princeton Brazil LAB screening in 2022:
The documentary explores the continued relevance of Makunaima — alternatively spelled Macunaíma or Makunaimã — a character perhaps best known for his appearance in Brazilian literature and film. One of the creation myths of the indigenous peoples living on the Amazonian border between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, the legend of Makunaima was documented by the German anthropologist Koch-Grünberg in his 1916 ethnography Vom Roraima zum Orinoco (From Roraima to the Orinoco). History was made when this book fell into the hands of the modernist Mario de Andrade, who would go on to pen the landmark novel Macunaíma: O herói sem nenhum caráter (Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character), published in 1928. The novel would be adapted in 1969 by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade into the most censored film of the Cinema Novo movement, and in 1979, Antunes Filho would bring it to the stage. With interviews in Portuguese, German, Spanish, Macuxi, and Taurepang, Searching for Macunaima follows these twists, turns, and transformations, artistically interrogating the myth’s continued resurgence.