Secrets of the Tribe

Director José Padilha starts his film with a Yanomami Indian who has had his fill of white people, anthropologists, and cameras. "You should be ignorant of us, but here you are taking my picture yet again," he snarls at the director. And this perfectly encapsulates an unparalleled scandal. The evil that has been done is rooted in the 1960s and 1970s, when a couple of anthropologists in the Venezuelan Amazon region discovered the Yanomami Indians. Their way of life had not changed for thousands of years. For anthropologists, this discovery was of immeasurable value, and at the time it gained a prominent position in scientific literature. But 40 years later, little remains of that triumph. What went wrong? Everything. And Padilha has the witnesses, victims, evidence, and images to prove it. Using the same approach as in his successful films, Padilha coolly reconstructs how the academic fairy tale deteriorated into unethical, vulgar mudslinging, with anthropologists accusing one another of genocide. But Padilha lets everyone have their say, including the ambitious scientists who have since been discredited.