Sandra K. Friday
Next we move from our "American place" into the larger world.
Emerald Forest
was filmed in the vanishing Brazilian rainforest, where an indigenous community of Amazons, aptly called the Invisible People, raises a Euro-American child who they capture when he wanders off from the sight of a huge dam that his engineer father is building, at the expense of several thousand acres of rainforest. Ten years later, when the boy's father, who has been searching for him, finds him in full ceremonial dress, as a young man fully acclimated to the Invisible People's life style, in what has become his geographical and sociological
space
in the rainforest, the compelling question must be answered, "Does his son
want
to return to a modern, urban society, a
place
he no longer identifies with home?" The boy's real father is challenged to choose to sacrifice what was just an objective
place
for the "progress" that the dam represents, or to choose the geographical and sociological
space
that is home to the indigenous community that now includes his own son.
The opening shots in the film show the remote and impersonal (objective) rainforest at a great distance from the balcony of the engineer's apartment, in urban Brazil. The movie then drops us into that rainforest and intimately into the lives of the Invisible People for whom it is the
center
of the world
. Conversely, there is a traumatic scene in which the engineer's son, now grown in the rainforest, must re-enter the city that is, by now, a
place
completely foreign to him, to try to locate his birth-father.
There are many opportunities to explore the geography of
place
and
space
in film like this that juxtaposes two worlds. The boy's real father, when immersed in the subjective
space
that has become his son's world, experiences an epiphany about his view of the rainforest and the humanity for whom it is home.
The rainforest is also home to an indigenous community of cannibals known as the "Fierce People" who come very close to killing the engineer in his quest for his son. Modern civilization, introduced in the form of a semi-automatic rifle by the engineer, inadvertently brings crushing losses to the Invisible People. This community that has raised the boy, refers to the men who are bulldozing the rainforest as the "Termite People" because they see them eating up the trees with their earth-moving equipment to make way for the dam. It certainly would be possible to generate an Internet search in conjunction with this film on the controversy surrounding the annihilation of the Brazilian rainforest in the name of "progress."