Cobra Canoa

Directed by Gabriel Gentil and Enio Staub

With Alvaro Tukano

Álvaro Tukano returns to his homeland after forty years. It's a journey of reunion with his origins, customs, family, and friends left behind when he had to flee persecution from the Salesian priests' boarding schools and the government, and became internationally recognized for his denunciations of the attempted cultural genocide against his people. The trip fulfills his father's request for him to receive initiation into the rites of passage of the Sacred Flutes and the Jurupari Dance, a ritual Álvaro was never able to participate in because the education he received within the Salesian missions prohibited and punished young indigenous people who sought to cultivate their culture. Upon his return, he finds the boarding schools in ruins and abandoned, and his people gradually resuming the sacred rituals that the machine of forgetting tried to erase.