Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made

In 1993 Sam Fuller takes Jim Jarmusch with him into the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. They go up the Araguaia river to the village of Santa Isabel do Morro. Forty years earlier Fuller had been sent to that same place to scout locations and write a script; the subject was jaguar hunters, and the film was never made. Fuller hopes to find people who remember him, and he brings the footage he shot in 1954. The village has changed a great deal; there are televisions, watches and brick houses. But the life of the Karajá people is still there as well. Fuller gathers the villagers and shows them the old footage, and people recognise friends and relatives in it. Mika Kaurismäki’s seventy five minute film, a joint Brazilian, Finnish and German production, was completed in 1994.