Ex-Shaman

The Paiter Suruí tribe went through most of 20th century isolated from the world. Perpera, our protagonist, was twenty when his people made contact with the white man in 1969. Until then, he was a powerful shaman, a carrier of ancestral knowledge. But the white man brought a new god with him and claimed that shamanism was a work of the devil. Perpera was forced to abandon his practices, and the spirits of the forests are still upset. When death haunts his people, the power to speak to the spirits becomes necessary again. "Anthropologist-turned-filmmaker Luiz Bolognesi elegantly straddles the line between documentary and fiction in Ex-Shaman, a beautifully composed look at a member of Brazil’s Pater Surui tribe whose training as a shaman has ostensibly made him redundant" (Variety).