Amazomania and the Limits of Ethnographic Desire

What happens when a Herzogian character, instead of resting on the laurels of his illusions, confronts the unpleasant truth? Nicholas Grossman’s ambitious Amazomania wrestles with the complex colonial legacy of the human gaze: driven by curiosity but ultimately rooted in extraction. 

In 1996, Brazilian ethnographer and civil activist Sydney Possuelo was accompanied by Swedish reporter Erling Söderström to the Javari Valley, home to the Korubo people, living in complete isolation from the globalized world. The footage, which Söderström later utilized for a 2003 TV documentary, The Hidden Tribes of the Amazon, shows a fascinating first encounter between the Korubo and the camera. A young Korubo man, already donning a cap and a T-shirt, approaches the lens up close, pointing at it, saying, “Who are you?”—looking at his own reflection. This poignant scene, brief yet haunting, brings to light the web of issues, from the seemingly innocent desire for the unknown to the responsibility that comes with power; from listening to Indigenous voices to the necessity of re-accessing what was once thought of as a great adventure.

Söderström’s original footage comprises half of Amazomania’s runtime. It is a fascinating narrative technique that plunges the viewer into the logic of extractivist colonialism without being pedagogical or imperative. Possuelo, for example, has a benevolent mission: to demarcate the Korubo’s territory and make peace with a tribe that has been attacked by local settler fishermen. The tribal people, in turn, do not shy away from thanking  Possuelo. Söderström’s aspirations are less pragmatic, as the reporter is driven by his thirst for the unknown. Both Possuelo and Söderström emerge as Herzogian characters—archetypes of the ethnographic genre—seeking “ecstatic truth” at the expense of Indigenous humans and ecologies.

While the first half of the film grounds it in the ethnographic fantasy of infantilized, curious natives who—beware!—can be violent and savage, the second half unravels something unexpected: the confrontation of Söderström and the Karubo. In 2021, Nicholas Grossman visits an elderly Söderström in his house in Sweden. Lying in a bathtub, the adventurer recalls the beauty of the place and its people that changed the course of his life. He shows Grossman thousands of images, proudly pointing to several portraits of the Korubo hanging on the wall. The camera lingers on a Korubo woman, bare-breasted, holding a child on her hip against the backdrop of the twilight sky, while Söderström ruminates on the purity of the image, evoking a lost paradise and the Virgin Mary. In his own documentary The Hidden Tribes of the Amazon, Söderström narrates his journey through the Amazon in a lyrical voiceover (“I am the eagle”). As beautiful as these images are, the voiceover robs the Korubo of their own perspective—something Grossman revisits in his reappropriation of the original footage, translating what the Korubo were in fact saying, including the moments when they asked the crew to stop filming.

In 2023, Grossman accompanies the reporter back to the Javari Valley for a reunion of sorts. As Söderström enthusiastically marches through the airport, he hopes that the Korubo community still remembers him. Upon arriving at the settlement, he painfully discovers that they do—and they want the 1996 footage back. “They” are those small kids that Söderström filmed during his first expedition. Now, in their twenties, these young men, having learnt Portuguese, are able to articulate their demand for restitution. For Söderström, this news arrives as a destruction of his romantic illusions. When he refuses to give up his rights over the footage, the Korubo men take his laptop.

In its attempt to make space for the Indigenous voices, Amazomania confronts an unsettling truth: behind every great adventurer, there is a native community that most likely did not consent to becoming either an object of study or a subject of a documentary. Grossman’s film gestures toward the camera as a complicit tool of modernity’s supremacy. When the Korubo first saw Söderström’s large, heavy camera, they believed it to be a weapon. And not without reason. Now, the village is connected to the Internet, and Grossman films men scrolling on their smartphones—a final image of a paradise lost.

Botagoz Koilybayeva

© FIPRESCI 2026