Cineanthropology – a modern linguistic practice par excellence. Uirá, the story of an Indian who sets out in search of God, a rare cosmogony in our cinema, is a film structured in medium shots, according to the rhythms of a synthesis produced by the dialectical montage of humanists like Rossellini and Bresson and historical materialists like Brecht. Flowing without the phenomenological accidents of a naturalistic river, Uirá, from the pure theory of universal cinema to cultural specificity, closes another cycle of modern Brazilian cinema, which began after 1968 with another Indianist film: Como era gostoso o meu francês, by Nelson Pereira dos Santos … Uirá masterfully employs the general theories of Cinema Novo and reincorporates the actor into reality, opens up avenues that eschew the complacent confusion between repression and creation, and points to the real as an object revealed by discourse that integrates scientific information and poetic transcendence. Uirá is the funeral of a civilisation that – as Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda recalls – did not have the strength to mobilise its own history. As a result, the Indians become the enemies of another History, which sings its glories in blood. In Tupi and Portuguese – since the actors play in a language stripped of all conceptual drama – Uirá laments, with the rigour of the moralists, the lack of generosity of those who have conquered in the name of the Faith and the Empire. Gustavo plays an official of the Service for the Protection of Indians: his speech, with the humility of great artists who are not ashamed of contracting the diseases of their people, attributes violence to its perpetrators. With Indian civilisation dead, the humanists offer the survivors the small comforts of their society. Uirá jumps from his car into the sea, swims like Taris in a journey that begins with Jean Vigo and ends in the Homeric myth of the brave warriors resurrected.

Glauber Rocha, Reviewing Histories: Selections from New Latin American Cinema, Hallwalls Inc. New York, 1987