Travelling Amazonia was shot on the Transamazonia road, a 6000-mile long highway cutting through Amazonia’s vast forest. This film centers on a attempt, implicit in the Transamazonia project carried out in the 1970s by Brazil’s military dictatorship, to draw a line through the forest. The construction of the Transamazonia generated an industry around the extraction of natural goods like metal, wood and rubber. In the film, these materials are used to build a dolly and tracks to realize upon the very same road a “travelling shot”. Through the making of this “travelling shot,” which recalls the illusions behind the idealism embedded in the Transamazonia’s project, the film addresses the processes and the pioneering ideas, that prevailed in this colonialist enterprise during the “hey-day” of Brazil’s aspiration to become “the country of the future”.

Shot in: Itaituba on the road Transamazónica, Amazonas, Brazil, August 2005
Director of photography: Roberto Thome de Oliviera Filho
Editor: Helle le Fevre
Sound: Cristian Manzutto
First Assistant: Diana Baldon
Executive Producers: Amanda Rodrigues Alves and Thomas Mulcaire

With Anonymous teenagers: Antonio Jose de Perez, Marcio Mello, Orlando Portela Pereira, José Rigonato Pereira da Silva

Construction: José Francisco Marcelino, Antônio Gonçalves Lima, Francisco Clesio, Jose Matias Souza, Adeilton Vieira da Conceição, Paulo Roberto Agra