Director: Marianna Brennand
Year: 2025
Denial is not a river in Brazil.
Documentary filmmaker Marianna Brennand’s debut narrative feature follows 13 year old Tielle (Jamilli Correa) and her family, living above the water in an isolated fishing/hunting community in the Amazon. Life is simple… until it isn’t. Amid the wild beauty of the rainforest lurks an ugly, open domestic secret, which Tielle’s adolescence brutally exposes her to.
In a place where the abuse doesn’t just poison one family but an entire community, the odds are stacked against this quiet but defiant girl. Her options trap her between the devil and the deep blue sea as she discovers the generational nature of the threat and the cognitive dissonance of her village, and seeks escape in further danger. Most hauntingly, Manas is based on a true story, developed from ten years of Brennand’s investigative research.
Despite the harrowing, real-life source material and Brennand’s background, Manas is gorgeous to look at, with rich, riotously colourful cinematography, and the verdant rainforest and wide-skied Amazon river offering the hope and escape so oppressively missing at home.
Brennand’s thoughtfully crafted film is full of unanswered questions – the same ones that go unanswered every time women or girls are systematically abused. How could it be allowed to happen, why did people know and do nothing, why do protective responses fail?
The unanswered questions are elegantly twinned with unspoken truths. The abuse is all the more devastating for happening offscreen and out of sight, where characters and audience alike know it’s happening. Inanimate objects stand in as code words for abuse and self-defence; a lipstick, a bowl of açai, a hammock fastening-rope. Jamilli Correa’s arresting, accusatory performance is deafening in its near silence, navigating the naïveté of adolescence and the uphill battle of a child desperately trying to protect herself and her young sister while growing up much faster than she should have to.
As with so much contemporary Brazilian cinema, in zeroing in on the trauma of one small community, Brennand confronts audiences with questions that the world should be asking. Manas highlights networks of abuse, victims’ voices dismissed, and the urgent need to break the cycle. A sharp debut that is as timely as it is beautiful.
