Abstract

This essay analyses The Falling Sky (2024), a film by the Brazilian filmmakers Gabriela Carneiro and Eryk Rocha. The exploratory hypothesis considers that, as an aesthetic construct, it constitutes an ethical-aesthetic device that transcends the limits of literary adaptation to establish itself as an ethnography of the eponymous book by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2015). The film performs a double operation of working through the past: on the one hand, it works through Yanomami rituals, mourning, and cosmopolitics; on the other, it invites the non-Indigenous spectator to excavate the ruins of the genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide (the Anthropocene) that mark Brazilian history. By mobilising Adornian concepts of working through the past and compassion (Mitleid), the essay contends that the film, in reversing the anthropological gaze and rendering the Yanomami interpreters of the West, creates the conditions of possibility for a self-determined reconciliation with history – a reconciliation that is not to be conflated with kitschy cliché forgiveness but rather demands the recognition of historical guilt and the transformation of the structures of recognition.