Canuto’s Transformation review – did a man really turn into a jaguar in Brazil’s remote forest?

H ere is a complex, mysterious docufictional mediation which unfolds at an unhurried walking pace, co-authored by the Indigenous Brazilian film-maker Ariel Kuaray Ortega, a member of the Mbyá-Guarani movie collective; it’s evidently been a personal project, many years in the making, and a prizewinner at the 2023 IDFA festival in Amsterdam. Ortega returns to his home town in a remote forested region on the border with Argentina , on a mission to investigate a local legend that a man called Canuto, from his grandfather’s generation, was transformed into a jaguar.

The film is at once a documentary on this subject and a record of the fictional re-enactment that Ortega is staging using local people – and, in a way, it is a film about itself. He speaks to his aged grandfather and to villager