The Cinema of Stewarding Reality: Interview with Renée Nader Messora and João Salaziva

Abstract

The interview with Renée Nader Messora and João Salaviza reveals the depth of the filmmakers’ relationship with the Krahô people, with whom they have been working for over a decade. What began as an encounter in the Brazilian Amazon has become a lifelong commitment and a cinematic practice grounded in coexistence, friendship, and the sharing of worlds. For them, cinema is less an instrument of recording reality than a space of relation — a “manejo” (stewardship) of reality that mirrors the Krahô’s own way of being: anti-extractivist, collective, and in constant dialogue among humans, non-humans, and spirits.

Messora and Salaviza reject the labels of fiction and documentary, conceiving their work as a sensitive translation of a world in which body and landscape, life and death, are continuous. Films such as The Dead and the Others (2018) and The Buriti Flower (2023) emerge from long collaborative processes in which narrative grows from the community’s daily life and shared memories.

Throughout the interview, the filmmakers also reflect on their upcoming project, Awkê, which explores the mythical invention of the “white man” according to the Krahô, linking the colonial period to the present. Throughout the following pages, an ethical and aesthetic position grounded in reciprocity emerges: cinema as a tool for thought and resistance — a space of translation between worlds, where new narrative forms and of inhabiting the sensible are continually being reimagined.