After several days in which the competition selection of the Venice Film Festival looked in danger of being overshadowed by the rather more rewarding sidebars, a serious contender for the Golden Lion has emerged. Even before Birdwatchers screened to the press, the Lido was saturated by rumours that the film was something special. This technically impressive tale didn’t disappoint.

The director and co-writer Marco Bechis sets his story in the lush plantation country of Mato Grosso do Sul, in contemporary Brazil. These fertile lands have been farmed by generations of wealthy fazenderos who play host to overseas tourists eager to spot wildlife increasingly endangered by rapacious agriculture. Occasionally, a boatload of particularly fortunate birdwatchers will catch a glimpse of the indigenous Indian tribal people, sullenly semi-clothed and staring from the riverbank wearing body paint and blank expressions. The film’s elegant opening shows just such an encounter, but rather than remain on the boat with the tourists and their expensive optical equipment, the camera follows the Indians as they trudge back through the woods to where a pickup truck waits with their T-shirts and a derisory payment from the tour operator.

Forced away from their ancestral lands into zoo-like reservations, the Guarani-Kaiowa people have been short-changed by a deal with the fazenderos that they never voluntarily entered into. The malaise of relentless poverty, lack of opportunity and disenfranchisement eats at the community; the malign spirit Angue seeks vulnerable souls to enter. Suicide among the young is at epidemic proportions. At the behest of the tribal elder Nadio, a group of native Indians sets up camp on the border of a plantation to campaign for the restitution of the land in which their forefathers are buried.

The film bears certain similarities with Ten Canoes, the fable set in an Australian indigenous community directed by Rolf De Heer. Both films are underscored by an earthy humour; both have a refreshingly prosaic approach to the mystical – the sound design is especially well used to convey the presence of an evil spirit. Like Ten Canoes, the strength of the storytelling and the rich character detail mean that Birdwatchers is unlikely to be dismissed as an ethnographic curiosity. Both address the pressures inherent in life in a tribal community without becoming didactic. But while Ten Canoes had a timeless, mythic quality, Birdwatchers’ contemporary setting gives it an added urgency.

The film is particularly effective in capturing the uneasy fascination and rumbling antipathy between two vastly different cultures forced to live side by side. Osvaldo, a teenage shaman in training, is drawn to the daughter of the landowner whose farm the Guarani-Kaiowa are camped near; the Indian women raucously mock the genitals of the ineffectual white man employed to keep them off the farmland. The tension between the two sides explodes at the film’s conclusion in a howl of rage and defiance that chills the blood.

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