Brazilian Indians in spotlight at Venice film festival

0 Comments | AFP, September, 2008

VENICE, Italy (AFP) — Fiction and fantasy gave way to harsh reality on Monday at the Venice film festival, with "BirdWatchers" exposing the plight of Brazil's Guarani Indians in the face of the biofuels boom.

"The economic potential of agriculture is one of the greatest threats to the Guaranis' land claims," said Marco Bechis, the Argentine-Italian director of the first political film screened at this year's festival.

"Land is always a problem between whites and the indigenous peoples," Bechis, 53, told a news conference. "The Guarani-Kaiowa survived one of the biggest genocides of history. The Conquest continues."

"We didn't invent very much at all," he added. "Our scriptwriters just put it into film form."

Eliane Juca De Silva, a Guarani...