Utopic Cannibalism in Carlos Fausto, Leonardo Sette, and Takumã Kuikuro’s As Hiper Mulheres

Abstract

Shamash’s chapter studies indigenous film productions in Brazil, particularly a documentary that portrays an all-women festival of the Kuikuro tribe, raising issues of cultural and environmental preservation. Shamash meditates on the utopian potential of the film medium as a performance of self-determination while tracing a genealogy of the decolonization of film history from Latin American Third Cinema to an international Indigenous Fourth Cinema. During this process, the author alludes to Kuikuro mythologies as they are represented through sound and image, along the notion of cannibalism as a subversive trope that empowers women as agents capable of leading the way in their communities.

Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. […] From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the surrealist Revolution and Keyserling’s technicized barbarian. We walk.

—Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago