Pia Marais spent something like six years getting Transamazonia made, and she keeps calling its existence a miracle, which is fitting for a film about a girl mistaken for one. The South African-born, Berlin-based director, a DFFB graduate making her fourth feature after more than a decade away, premiered the film in competition at Locarno and carried it to the New York Film Festival, Chicago, and TIFF. By the end of the conversation, her advice to her younger self has become the title.
You do need to fight to make your film.
A Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Rebecca, played by System Crasher breakout Helena Zengel, is the sole survivor of a childhood plane crash deep in the Amazon, declared a miracle, and raised by her American missionary father Lawrence, played by Jeremy Xido, who casts the teenager as a faith healer whose growing fame sustains their mission. When illegal loggers invade the Indigenous land the pair are evangelizing, Lawrence maneuvers them into the center of the conflict. The film braids three forces, the Indigenous communities, the loggers tearing down the forest, and the girl in the middle, into what Marais calls a morality tale about belief.
The premise grew from a true story Marais was haunted by but never wanted to adapt: Juliane Koepcke, the German-Peruvian teenager who in 1971 was the sole survivor of a plane that disintegrated over the Peruvian Amazon, fell some three kilometers strapped to her seat, and walked out of the jungle eleven days later, the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Wings of Hope. What gripped Marais wasn’t the survival but the aftermath: how the world projected meaning onto Koepcke, strangers writing to explain why she’d been spared, astrologers sending charts, a real person turned into a screen for other people’s needs. Herzog, incidentally, had narrowly missed that same flight while scouting Aguirre.
The Father, and What He Takes
The other half of the film came from a documentary about a different kind of projection.
Marais points to Asif Kapadia’s Amy, the portrait of Amy Winehouse and her father, as the deeper source, the whole genre, she says, of parents who keep their children from growing up and misappropriate their trust, using them to meet their own needs. The question she lifted from it is conditional love: will the parent still love the child once she stops dancing for them, once she ceases to perform? That’s why the father had to be a preacher rather than just a parent, because the film needed the machinery of belief to make the exploitation visible.
Marais traces the obsession honestly back to herself, to a lingering uncertainty about whether she was unconditionally loved by her own parents, and to the larger question of what determines who we become. She distrusts directors who claim to have worked everything out in advance; she’d rather not fully understand what a film is about until after she’s shot it, the way a documentary keeps surprising you. It’s why she’s drawn to a film like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where the very structure is built from trauma, the form mirroring the wound, an idea that shaped her own film’s opening on the worst moment of Rebecca’s life.
Here’s the stance the film quietly builds. Marais rhymes her two exploitations until they become the same gesture at different scales. The father extracts belief from his traumatized daughter the way the loggers extract timber from the forest, the way the world extracted meaning from a girl who fell out of the sky. Rebecca stands literally between the Indigenous people and the loggers because she is the film’s image of extraction itself, a human resource mined for the faith and hope others need. Faith, in Marais’s hands, isn’t the opposite of deforestation; it’s the same logic, the conversion of a living thing into something usable, and the conditional-love question becomes the ecological one: do we value the forest, or only what it yields? It puts the film in conversation with Roland Joffé’s The Mission, where evangelism and empire collide over Indigenous land, and with the Oscar-winning Marjoe, the documentary about a child evangelist exploited by his parents as a faith-healing vessel.
Working With, Not Filming
The film’s ethical counterweight is in how it was made. Marais learned early, on a research trip living with the Tenharim people, that the only honest way to work with Indigenous communities was through their participation and consent; they had every reason not to trust outsiders, having only ever experienced harm, and they kept her firmly outside what they didn’t wish to share. So on Transamazonia she worked with Claudio Barros, an actor and theater director with three decades of activism alongside Indigenous nations, who secured the chiefs’ and the agency’s permissions and ran the casting and workshops. Because the cast came from different nations, Barros and the actors together invented a fictional tribe, its myth, its backstory, its name, its makeup, so the performers held authorship over their own characters. It’s a model of making that takes only with permission and gives authorship back, the opposite of the extraction the film indicts.
The Fight, Literally
The production tested the title’s mantra to its limit. Marais and her team cut roughly forty percent of the script, a fuller, more action-heavy version, down to something essential, simply to fit a budget that hovered under three million dollars for a film shot across the Amazon. The plan had been to package the project with a well-known American actor to attract financing; when that never came together, she let it go.
The universe will provide if you let it.
The actor she eventually loved for the father left nine days before shooting, and Jeremy Xido, an LA documentary filmmaker with an acting background, materialized through a sound engineer’s recommendation, taping his audition and joining a shoot with no air conditioning, no trailers, no comforts, in primary rainforest in French Guiana and the deforested expanses around Tucuruí in Brazil. They had no snake wranglers because they had no money. Often there was a single take. Marais embraces that, fascinated by limitation leading to gold, by the things you didn’t plan, and she’s candid that documentaries taught her to surrender control and trust what the moment offers rather than execute a locked plan. She’s equally candid that in the edit she missed the scenes she’d cut.
That fight extends past the shoot. Much of the conversation is a clear-eyed tour of how independent films actually get financed and seen, the German regional and federal funds increasingly behaving like private investors chasing a red carpet, the public-television money that’s grown so hard to secure, and the lament she shares with Marcus about a film culture hollowed out by streaming and blockbusters, drifting toward what they both call junk food, and badly in need of curation and two-screen cinemas over empty multiplexes. Transamazonia has distribution across Europe and in Brazil but, as of the conversation, none in the US, the sales handled by an agent and her producers. Which is why her parting advice carries the weight of everything that preceded it: work the room, develop a thick skin, take every opportunity, and don’t take the no’s personally, because unless you were born into the connections, no one is going to make the film for you. You have to fight.
