2023 Cannes: ‘The Buriti Flower’ Wins Un Certain Regard Ensemble Prize

Filmmakers Renée Nader Messora and João Salaviza have won their second Un Certain Regard Ensemble Prize for The Buriti Flower at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France. The filmmaker couple won their first Un Certain Regard Ensemble award for The Dead and the Others in 2018. 

The Buriti Flower tells the story of the Krahô Indigenous community, who reside in northeastern Brazil, and their contemporary and past struggles with the Brazilian government. The film also showcases environmental issues through an imaginative style by shifting between a documentary and a fictional narrative.

The crew spent 15 months living and developing a relationship with the Krahô to prepare for the film. In addition to studying and documenting the community since 2009, Messora has mobilized a local group of Krahô filmmakers.

In an exclusive interview with Variety, Portuguese filmmaker João Salaviza spoke about his privilege as an outsider and the boundaries he established to respect the Krahô during filming. 

Even if we’ve had a very close relationship with the tribe for over a decade and our process is very intimate, we are still foreigners. So this immediately brings the question of distance, which I think it’s very important in cinema…it’s really about how close you can be at a certain moment and how can you interfere in what’s going on?

While the film mainly centers on the oppressive history of the Krahô people, Salaviza states that many of the Krahô today utilize technology to connect with other indigenous groups to create global solidarity. 

…Nowadays through technology they are building new connections amongst each other. It’s a subversion of the non-Indigenous language and technology in favor of their own ambitions, goals, and cosmologies. So they are really occupying a central position in connections between past and future and tradition in modernity.

During the red carpet premiere of Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu at Cannes, the Krahô cast staged a protest supporting land rights for oppressed indigenous people worldwide.