‘The Falling Sky’ Directors Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha on How The Amazon’s Yanomami Tribe Can Teach ‘White People’ to Dream Collectively

variety.com:

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Brazilian directors Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha’s “The Falling Sky” delves into lives of the Amazonian Yanomami people, who live in the heart of the Amazon rainforest where they are contending with a harsh humanitarian crisis caused by the massive invasion of wildcat miners searching for gold and cassiterite, a mineral used in electronics.

This unique doc – which launches in Directors Fortnight – is inspired by the thoughts, expressed in an eponymous book, of Davi Kopenawa, a shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami who performs the reahu ritual, a collective ceremony to hold up the sky and prevent it from falling.

The directors spoke in unison to Variety about why the Yanomami’s struggle against miners transcends the woes of their land and how their cosmology can help heal our planet as a whole. What drew you to this project? In the book Davi Kopenawa says that it’s his will to extend his world so that white people – non-indigenous people – can hear him and in particular learn how to dream.

His diagnosis about our society in our opinion is, very, very precise: the problem of [us] non-indigenous people is that we sleep a lot, but we can only dream within ourselves.