The general idea in the film is that underdevelopment consists of many things, but above all the underdevelopment of consciousness. On one hand, there is a typical story that follows a Brazilian family across the country as they encounter various stages of underdevelopment. It is the story of a group of people who pass from slavery to international capitalism. On the other hand, there are documentary clips that seem as important to me because they provide the objective, historical, economic and political reasons for the story we are watching… A dialectic relationship always exists between documentary and fiction.

Gianni Amico, Tropici, Interview by Adriano Aprà and Piero Spila, “Cinema e Film”, no. 7-8, Winter-Spring 1969

Tropici begins by taking its time, the duration of the shots matches the unbearable slowness of the gestures, the steps, the movements, the glances; from one side of the frame to the other, as if from one plane to another, an eternity that is anything but serene; on the contrary, it is fierce. […] Everything is filmed from afar, as if the camera isn’t part of the adventure or its world, as if cinema itself were part of the drama from the start, as if this very story opposes any form of expression; as if nothing can translate it, neither dialogue nor images, as if it has existed and played out for so long and so irremediably as to place it beyond or at least at the furthest realms of any possible representation. It is more than just respect or an awareness of the incongruity of the action of filming something that, no matter what, cinema is unable to remedy; the fact that the director imposes such a distance on himself and the spectator does not derive only from a moral choice, an honest sense of discretion: in some way, and without doubt neo-Rossellinian, this moral condition implies the exclusive adoption and use of a cinema of minimal intervention: the things are there, let them come to cinema. […] Gianni Amico’s intention therefore acquires precise meaning: to not describe, but to leave to a certain Brazilian reality the significance and place it gives itself, to be amazed that it is simply not seen. It is a critical dimension that also makes Tropici, albeit not by way of the standard routes, a political engaged work.

Jean-Louis Comolli, “Cahiers du cinéma”, no. 203, August 1968