Morzaniel Ɨramari

We are in front of Watorikɨ – the house of the spirits – a rocky presence that non-Indigenousindigenous people try to translate into the words mountain of the wind. But from now on, we will listen to the Yanomami language, along paths traced among the sounds of the forests. Paths that Morzaniel Ɨramari decides to follow, modulating perspectives based on his cosmosophy. Mãri Hi [The Dream Tree] (2023) and Urihi Haromatimapë [Healers of the Forest Land] researches the reality of the dreams of the Yanomami, for whom the dimensions of the physical, oneiric, and spiritual worlds are intimately connected to each element of life in the forest. Or rather, the forest-land – as they usually call it – because they need to remind us that the forest is the same planet shared by all of us.

In this journey into the dream, the guiding voice is breathed by Davi Kopenawa’s body. The discourse, then, infiltrates the gaps in the images and materializes zones of creation whose existence would be impossible in literal or ethnographic records. We see figures amidst the foliage, the lens does not focus on the obvious; an excessive brightness suddenly flickers; the sensation of Yãkoana dust. What do the Yanomami see in the dream? “Other things than you white people,” says Kopenawa. If the logical smoke of colonization threatens the Yanomami – illegal mining, disease, and deforestation –- it also turns against non-Indigenousindigenous people, colonizing every inch of their lives, even the recondite regions of their dreams, quantifying and algorithmizing them in order to domesticate them in cities. Ɨramari’s filmography proposes visions of this same-otherworld that the rest of us earthlings insist on ignoring, like someone who shirks responsibility. At the end of Mãri Hi, the translatory efforts close off the escape routes with the following dream-speech by Kopenawa, who appears on the screen with notebook in hand: “these words have been translated into other languages of whites and now they are able to understand them. Let us share this thought so that together we become wiser.”

igor de albuquerque
translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

Morzaniel Ɨramari Yanomami (Demini, Yanomami Indigenous Land, RR, Brazil, 1980) is a Yanomami filmmaker and interpreter. He has worked as the coordinator of communication at the Hutukara Yanomami Association, and now Morzaniel travels the world showcasing his films and promoting Yanomami heritage and rights. Among his films are Casa dos espíritos – Xapiripë Yanopë (2010), Urihi Haromatimapë – Curadores da terra-floresta (2014) and  Árvore do sonho (2023).