Event

Mary Jane Regalado Presents: Iracema : Uma Transa Amazônica

Mary Jane Regalado (Gauche, Downtown Boys) is a musician, visual artist, DJ and occasional radio show host currently residing in Washington, D.C. Her interests include subversive media, Chicanx feminism, underground art and record collecting. Her favorite film is Zootopia.

ABOUT THE FILM

A girl from the countryside goes to the city of Belém to take part in the Círio de Nazaré celebrations. Led to prostitution, she wishes to move to the wealthiest Southeast region of Brazil. In a dance club, she meets a truck driver that transports wood. Dreaming with the big city, she asks for a ride, and the two begin a journey through the Trans-Amazon road. In tension with the Brazilian military authorities of the time, the film registers several aspects of the Amazon social tragedy forest fires, slave work and child prostitution. Awarded in several international festivals, the film was forbidden by the Brazilian censorship. It was only released years later, winning the Brasília Film Festival in 1981.

"A film of rough-and-ready beauty, 1975's Iracema, Uma Transa Amazônica, captures Brasil's Amazon basin and the squalor around the emerging Trans-Amazonian Highway with rich eye-popping Eastmancolor and an unflattering semi-documentary veritas that was too hot to handle for the Brazilian military government that banned its initial domestic release for six years." Letterboxd

"I cannot even imagine how the directors thought that this daring and extremely realistic film could ever be approved by the Brazilian censorship when it was made, since it exposes a harsh truth like a television news story, with mostly improvised dialogue and non-professional actors." Carlos Magalhães