The roof is on fire, and, in the Amazon, they are not going to let the mother f****r burn in the mesmerizing documentary The Falling Sky, directed by Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro Da Cunha. Based on the book by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, the film follows the Yanomami, a tribe in the Amazon rainforest who believe it is their calling to prop up the sky. At one point, back when the sky fell, their people developed rituals to fight against the sky falling again.
Shaman Kopenawa performs the complex Reahu ritual, performed during the final cremation of lost ones, for the cameras. This involves the nasal ingestion of the yakoana powder, which launches the Shaman into the realm of dreams. There are long orations on the infestation of material people, manifested as the destruction caused by the industrial invasion of the rainforest. Miners moved into areas that were the homes of the Yanomami and took them over through organized rape and murder. The tribe has to keep moving, being pushed further out of where they have lived for hundreds of years. It is against this bloody landscape that the shamans do the rituals to keep the sky up in the air despite all the odds.
Growing up in a small town in the 80s, I had access to the phenomenon known as the heavy metal graveyard party. These would be impromptu gatherings where lots of lower-class teens in torn denim would smoke pot while listening to boom-box metal. They never lasted long as the police would inevitably descend, and everyone would scatter. They were doomed parties for the doomed, with fleeting moments of pure liberation before you are ground into the dirt again.
“…the shamans do the rituals to keep the sky up in the air despite all the odds.”
This is the world I recognized while watching The Falling Sky, one of the most gorgeous portraits of irrational defiance ever made. The rituals the tribe performs will not stop the encroachment of their world by the mining. The land will still be ripped out from underneath them, and they will need to keep moving. But they still perform the rituals against the constant devastation, standing up to their doom with fury instead of resignation. In other words, they are going to party until the world obeys. It is a glorious reaction against nihilism versus a slow grey smothering in its deadly embrace. This kind of dead-end defiance is one of the sweetest parts of existence, and it is all right here, spread out on a cosmic picnic cloth.
The Falling Sky doesn’t spoon-feed you any information; rather, it blows it up your nose. This production, without explanation, works brilliantly in immersing the audience in the electricity of the Reahu ritual. Not knowing what is going on or what is heading towards you instills a discombobulation that allows you to surrender to the void and go with it.
A lot of the techniques seem experimental on the surface, but the moment you stop resisting the absence of expository, you will see that unconventional methods are. Instead, exciting new visual storytelling is rarely seen in a documentary. The audience becomes disoriented, confounded, and then utterly seduced by the swirl of visual splendor. Cinematographers Rocha and Bernard Machado fill the widescreen with the kind of composition reserved for Renaissance frescos.
Your vision will be stretched beyond imagination by unseen wonders. Because of this, The Falling Sky fits perfectly in the high ranks of cult documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka. You will be tripping balls even if you go into the screening clean and bare-headed. You may not comprehend everything, but you will feel every inch.
"…Your vision will be stretched beyond imagination by unseen wonders..."
