Híbridos, the Spirits of Brazil | ReVista 13/04/2021, 11:23

Religion and Spirituality - Indigenous Religions in the Contact Zone

Híbridos, the
Spirits of Brazil
A Poetic and Cinematic Winter
Research on Spirituality and its 2021, Volume
Music XX, Number 2

by Fernanda Abreu | Feb 15, 2021

Povo Xavante:Ritual Wai_á, Aldeia Ri´pá, Terra Indígena

Pimentel Barbosa, Canarana, Mato Grosso. ©Hibridos
Moon,Telmon

Eight years ago, in 2013, I received an unexpected

email from French >lmmaker Vincent Moon, who was
looking for a Brazilian partner to undertake an

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ambitious project: a poetic and cinematographic

research on spirituality and its musicality in Brazil.

At that point, Vincent had spent 10 years of his life

researching the relationship between music and the
sacred across several countries, resulting in >lms that
could be streamed on his website for free. When I got
his email, I already knew his work and admired his
way of making movies. His images, charged with
rhythm and saturated with humanity, were very
attractive and bold. Vincent would tell me, as a foreign
>lmmaker, what I would experience as a Brazilian
>lmmaker: “The South American giant has the most
diverse spiritual culture in the world.”

There’s no other place on the planet where Indigenous,

African, and European cultures live so intrinsically
together—and the friction caused by this tightly woven
fabric can have both destructive and inspiring results.
Then maybe this could inspire this collapsing world to
create other forms of living together. It was with this
promise that Vincent presented me with his proposal.

I immediately accepted it. And as we moved forward

with developing the idea, the project imposed itself
upon us like an entity, an enigmatic and riveting path
that demanded following. And that’s how, at 30 years
of age, I started to truly understand the many Brazils
imprinted on me. And that, as a giant, Brazil has

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diverse, very complex meanings. And moreover, we

have highly sophisticated technologies when it comes
to the connection between ordinary and extraordinary.

Vincent, his partner and Híbridos co-director Priscilla

Telmon, and I had an intense virtual exchange for
months as we mapped the spiritual manifestations that
could make it into the project. This is when we started
weaving a network of places, people, entities, saints,
encantados, orixás, old and new manifestations that
would later become a collection of stunning content
available to anyone navigating the unknown waters of
the internet.

Is Communion between Nature and the Invisible

Possible in Today’s World?

We turned to shamans, mães de santo and pais de santo,

healers and believers in search of inspiration. It was
quickly clear that this was not about researching and
solving mysteries—it was about listening, a mysterious
experiment. An active type of listening that would
cause the project to trace its own trajectory.

In talks with the audience and specialists about

Híbridos, we always get asked about the challenges of
intimately accessing closed rituals—many of which are

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secret and had been >lmed for the very >rst time. We
documented around 120 rituals across 17 states of
Brazil, involving dozens, maybe hundreds, of people.
Looking back, I see that we achieved this fairly easily
because of our method.

We went from the popular Festa de Iemanjá in Salvador,

Bahia to an Almas e Angola ritual in Florianópolis,
Santa Catarina, an urban ayahuasca ritual at
Fraternidade Kayman in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais,
and a traditional Xambá ceremony in Recife—we
crossed the country in search of the encounters.

The project relied solely on private funding: some from

our own pockets (feever >lmes and Petites Planètes,
the production companies), from the co-producers
(Samba Filmes), from associate producers and from the
Rumos Itaú Cultural Prize—which allowed us to create
the website. In >lmmaking, limited resources must
join forces with resilience, freedom, improvisation,
and strong personal motivation—and this is what we
had in our favor.

Eduardo Coutinho, a renowned Brazilian documentary

>lmmaker, used to say: “A movie is a negotiation
between the desires of those who do the >lming and
the desires of those who are >lmed.” The main
investors in Híbridos are those who consented to be
>lmed in moments of intimacy, who opened their

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doors and the paths needed for this project to exist.

Our approach was based on simplicity and sincerity:
“We have a grandiose idea, we are a small and under-
resourced team, we are working on this project
because we believe, and we would like to count on
you.” We had mostly positive responses. We dealt,
above all, in good faith.

Our >rst shoot was in August 2014, in the city of Codó,

Maranhão state. During our research, a local friend
told me this was the “Capital of Enchantments,” the
land of Terecô. One of the main practitioners of this
Afro-Brazilian religion was a man whose age was a
mystery and whose knowledge was in>nite. The
powers of Terecô are linked to the occult knowledge of
the Indigenous, the Africans and partly to
Catholicism.

The story goes that, in 1985, Mestre Bita do Barão

caused the drums in the city to roll incessantly for
seven days until the then-president, Tancredo Neves—
who was hospitalized at the time—passed away and
the vice-president, José Sarney, a Maranhão native,
took ojce as the President of Brazil. There are a
handful of stories about politicians who sought the
help of Mestre Bita do Barão’s powers, earning him the
title of Commander of the Republic. He never
con>rmed his deeds, but never dismissed them either.

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In 2014, the almost mythical Mestre Bita must have

been between 90 and 100 years old. Our >rst
experience was intense: we spent seven days shooting
the uninterrupted celebrations that attract dozens of
the people coming from all the corners of the country
to greet caboclos, princesses, saints, encantados, and
orixás at the Festejo dos Santos e Orixás. The
intersection of so many beliefs and traditions, the
honorary commendation, the sumptuousness of the
rites…it was all so whimsical and utterly Brazilian. This
was our starting point because we feared Bita might
take a long nap before we had a chance to >nalize the
project, but he would live to see his movies.

Ritual de Almas e Angola, Tenda Espírita Oxosse

Caçador,Santa Catarina ©Hibridos Moon,Telmon

We lem Codó knowing that we had to come back to

São Luis, Maranhão the following May to >lm the

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traditional Festa do Divino. We returned in 2015 to >lm

with another personality, as important as Mestre Bita:
Pai Euclides, founder of Casa Fanti Ashanti. We had
the opportunity to capture his last tribute to the divine
—the great tambor de mina master passed away a few
months following our meeting.

I share these experiences to illustrate some of the

decision-making process when it comes to what and
when to >lm. Our planning involved making the most
of the possibilities onered by each location while
staying attuned to “callings” that would arise, when
they did.

We agreed that the shooting phase would span more

than a year, covering a full cycle of the ojcial
Brazilian calendar and the Catholic events upon which
it is based, but also encompassing everything else that
could take place within this period. We started in
August 2014 and wrapped up in September 2015 with a
last trip to Mato Grosso state, speci>cally to Xingu
National Park, to >lm the Kuarup—an Indigenous
ritual to honor the dead that attracts people from
dinerent villages in the region.

Over their stay in Utawana village with the Mehinako

people, Vincent and Priscilla garnered their hosts’
trust, so much so that they were invited to >lm a
healing ritual with the shaman Pajé Tukuyari—which

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turned out to be the dazzling scene that closes the

feature >lm.

Once the shooting phase was concluded, our next

challenge would meet us back in Rio de Janeiro. Not
only did we have to edit a movie for each ritual (a
process we had kicked on during the shooting phase),
but we also had to put together the website to house
all our research plus a feature >lm that documented
the full extent of the journey. At the core of this
challenge was creating a new, cinematographic ritual
out of all the vibrant and unique rituals we had
captured.

We gathered hours of interviews on rites, traditional

knowledge, possessions, trance and healing
technologies. We asked every possible question to
understand that, in this hybrid universe of Brazilian
spirituality, words cannot account for what music,
dance and people in congregation can do.

The >rst decision while editing the feature >lm was

not including words in the form of interviews or
narration in the movie. We would only have ambient
audio—forest sounds, chanted hymns, ritual music and
conversations with the divine.

We were interested in capturing the moment in which

we, inhabitants of this plane, interact with the realm of

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the extraordinary. People of the forest excel at this, but

city people, immersed in the confusion of urban
reality, are not too far behind.

The story opens with native people, in a Yawanawá

ceremony, followed by the largest Catholic pilgrimage
in the world, Círio de Nazaré—a reference to the
arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil, and then Afro-
Brazilian, Spiritist, Evangelical, Kardecist Spiritist,
Amazonian, and urban rituals, circling back to the
originating people in the Xingu region. This spiraling
edit aims to convey the circular perception of time that
is particular to nature-based beliefs.

The website is complementary to the feature >lm

experience and contains more information on each
ritual, each place. By organizing the project like this,
there was also an intention to question our
relationship with screens. What we see and how we
perceive it through each medium: computer, mobile
phone, movie screen, outdoor screenings, and art
galleries. Each interface oners a dinerent possibility of
immersion.

Even before we began >lming, mass protests in 2013

resulting in violent police repression were causing
Brazil to change. At that time, the evangelical caucus
was gaining more political leverage, and a pastor who
freely incited homophobia and religious prejudice

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became chair at the Human Rights Commission.

We wrapped up the project in 2017. President Dilma

Roussen had already been impeached and the rise of
the evangelical caucus we had observed as we kicked
on our project was the result of one of the country’s
demographic realities: the rapid growth of Evangelical
religions, mainly Pentecostal, allowing the
consolidation of protestant pastors in power had
become a concrete reality.

We were deep into the editing phase when we found a

way to include the second-largest religious group in
the country, omen connected to hate and totalitarian
speech, in the >lm. The evangelical concept, currently
used by non-evangelical people and the media to refer
to a vast group of non-Catholic Christians in Brazil,
causes tremendous confusion. From conservative
Protestantism to several new theologies, being
evangelical in Brazil goes far beyond the image
proposed by powerful pastors who become politicians
and by the media.

At Monte Escadas de Jacó, an outdoor prayer spot in

Rio de Janeiro, we found people from dinerent beliefs
searching for a connection with Christ through chants
and prayer. The images in the feature >lm show a
woman speaking in tongues and holding her hand over
another woman who, lying on her back and wearing a

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Brazilian soccer team jersey, receives loving and

healing vibrations. That was our last day of >lming.

Ultimately, these are all displays of faith and

spirituality involving magic and religious rituals in
order to establish a line of communication between the
ordinary and extraordinary planes—and this is the idea
behind religare, which gives sense to religion and
means to bind, to tie.

Once the arduous editing was over and we were still

making sense of what the material was telling us, a
new and more radical form of Híbridos came along: live
cinema. As an investigation of what could be a
cinematographic ritual, we did a series of live shows in
which Vincent would edit a new movie on the spot
with the contribution of musicians who improvised
their sounds in a live dialogue with the projected
images. With each presentation, a dinerent movie,
experience, ritual.

For the Brazilian premiere, we did one of these live

shows on a large patio at MASP (São Paulo Art
Museum). Seeing the images of a shaman in the Xingu
region, a Xambá ceremony in Recife, an ayahuasca
ritual in Acre projected in its largest format along
Paulista Avenue, the spinal cord of cosmopolitan São
Paulo, for an audience of 400 moved people was a
beautiful retection of the crossing we have come to

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understand as Brazil throughout our four years of

work.

I write this today, halfway into January 2021, amer the

conclusion of the coup d’état that took place in Brazil,
starting at around the same time we started our
project. Since colonial times, there has been a
sophisticated process in place to annihilate
dinerences, one that is now openly revealed by the
leadership elected in 2018 under the slogan: Brazil
above everything, God above everyone.

Romaria do Bom Jesus da Lapa – Bahia ©Hibridos

Moon,Telmon

What political leaders insist on erasing is precisely this

fascinating dimension of the crossing, the merging.
There is no Brazil that can override Brazil, there is no
God that can override another deity.

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Híbridos is, above all, an ode to Brazil and Brazilians, to

our ancestors and our ancestries. To the country-
crossing hybrid that blurs, with faith and music, the
borders between sacred and profane, ordinary and
extraordinary, real and supernatural, and points the
way—guided by the dimension of the unpredictable,
the un>nished—of possibility.

Fernanda Abreu is a Brazilian >lmmaker interested in the

intersection of daily life and poetry. Her projects seek to capture
universal emotions in everyday gestures.

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