A hazardous expedition to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, filmed in 1996, becomes a cultural and moral minefield in Amazomania, a thought-provoking documentary in which Swedish director Nathan Grossman (I Am Greta, Climate in Therapy) explores the white man’s gaze and turns the camera on colonial legacy and the film itself.
The doc, world premiering in the main competition of the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, theCopenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, on Monday, March 16, is a tale of two halves.
In the first part of the film, Grossman rewinds the tapes of the 1996 trip, organized by a Brazilian civil servant and Swedish journalist Erling Söderström to meet the Korubo tribe, who chose to live far away from civilization. The expedition ended in a first encounter, with the footage hailed as a sensation, rare images from a long-hidden world.
The second part of Amazomania follows Söderström on his journey back to the tribe 30 years later. But the trip doesn’t quite go as hoped. In the process, a profound misunderstanding is revealed. And the Korubo tribe demands compensation and insists on the right to tell its own story.
“Amazomania is a complex study in documentary method and ethics, and it is a film with enormous confidence in the audience’s own judgement,” the CPH:DOX website highlights.
Grossman directed the film produced by Cecilia Nessen. The doc features cinematography by Grossman, Söderström and Diego Lajst. The editors of Amazomania are Jordana Berg and Grossman. Autlook Filmsales is handling sales.
The resurfaced footage of the 1996 expedition decades later “forces the re-examination of the contact and the implications that followed,” reads a synopsis of the doc. “Uncovering the costs of ‘discovery,’ the film confronts the colonial legacy and exposes the long-term repercussions for the Korubo.”
Grossman talked to THR about how he came to make Amazomania, the conflicts and moral issues it has raised and will continue to, and how the doc’s title emerged.
You are in your 30s, so how did you find out about or come across the old footage and end up making this film?
During the COVID pandemic, a friend of mine told me that he had heard that this archive of a Swedish filmmaker, Erling, existed. So, I decided to go visit, figuring that this wouldn’t be the complete material. But a large part of it still existed and had never been digitized and was in fairly touchy condition. I felt that I wanted to at least digitize the full material and have a look.
Erling Söderström in ‘Amazomania’
Courtesy of Nathan Grossman
How many hours of material were there?
It was somewhere around 60 to 70 hours. And it took some time to organize it and put together audio pieces, because some audio was of low quality. After some time, I was able to watch through all of it in the correct order, and it was clear to me that [what it captured] was very different from the previous presentation of this adventure documentary that came out in the early 2000s.
How did you learn about the Korubo and their views as you worked on the film?
I watched the footage and started discussing it with anthropologists and members of the Korubo themselves. I just went in with a very big chunk of curiosity and wanted the community’s view on this. And I wanted to understand if they thought it would have any relevance to make a new film looking at this. I was also interested in their relationship with the Western media. I saw in the original footage that there was this friction. And I also read some academic reports pointing out that the Korubo group had experienced a very big disappointment, looking at Western media and, actually, the camera as an object. So, we followed meticulous rules that are now set up, also by the community itself. It’s even mentioned in the film that they now have a meticulous way of working with journalists and tourists, which is also a little bit the result of how the contact was made in 1996.
Can you tell me a bit more about the feelings that the members of the Korubo tribe had towards the camera?
What is interesting is that this was a group that lived in isolation, and one of the first hyper-industrialized objects that they ran into was a really big camera. And the Korubo thought the camera was a gun. Amazomania really circles around that. It’s not an anthropological film about the Korubo community specifically. It’s more about looking at the Western media and the white man’s gaze and fascination for this kind of adventure story.
‘Amazomania’ behind-the-scenes shot of Nathan Grossman talking to the Korubo
Courtesy of Barbara Arisi
Have you gotten any reactions from people who have seen the film so far?
What’s lovely is that more or less all audiences that have seen the film have been thrilled by the adventure, which is the plan of the movie, and then when it kind of turns on its head and we get to hear the voices of the community, they really look at their own fascination for these images in a different way. The audience is included in this critique. So, there is an audience part of both seeing the adventure and then looking critically at yourself. I think it’s a nice way to include the audience that way.
Jordana Berg, the editor, who also worked on Apocalypse in the Tropics, is one of the most talented editors in the documentary world. She’s really incredible, and we went on this meticulous way of involving the audience. Questions of reparations are a fairly academic subject. But the cinematic room is so great for making sure that these intellectual ideas become visceral. When we zoom in on a specific event and a specific place and time, we can understand more complicated cultural ideas. I think the idea of reparations is very interesting, and it’s been big in the museum world when it comes to artifacts, but I think it’s also interesting to look at it a little bit from an immaterial rights perspective and from the journalistic world.
Do you know much about groups that are still living in isolation from civilization, where watching Amazomania could help the Western world in case of possible future interactions?
We may think that there are no more groups living in voluntary isolation, that everyone is part of our Western or global civilization. But that’s not true. There are more than 200 groups still living in voluntary isolation, and with the changes in the global climate and environment, unfortunately, we will have more contact events. So, it’s important to have a film like Amazomania for us in the media, also to think critically about how we should address such future events and consider what the best way could be.
‘Amazomania’ film still
Courtesy of Nathan Grossman
Do you think Amazomania will stand the test of time better than the original film?
I hope that in 30 years’ time, things will have advanced even further from the way we made this film and that there will be even better practices. On Amazomania, the [members of the] Korubo community are executive producers. They are stakeholders in the film. But in the future, I hope that they will be able to get the rights to this material and also make their own films about the development of this community.
How many of the Korubo have seen Amazomania?
I worked on the last edit of the film together with representatives from the community in late 2025. So, it’s not that the full community of 150 people has seen it, but community representatives of different ages and genders have watched the film. That was a very, very important step, watching it together with them and representing them [based on their input and] arguments.
How did you find the title Amazomania?
It’s crazy, we’ve come up with a new noun. I think we all have slight Amazomania. I come back to this fascination with this place and this feeling of adventure. We didn’t decide on the title until the final steps of the project. Erling probably has more Amazomania than most of us, but the title is not pointed directly at Erling. I think it [reflects] a broader feel for our Western gaze that has Amazomania.