Video & On Demand - The Fever (online & DVD)
Manaus is an industrial city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest. Justino, 45 and a native Desana, works as a security guard at the cargo port. Since the death of his wife, his main company is his youngest daughter with whom he lives in a modest house on the outskirts of town. A nurse at a health clinic, Vanessa is accepted to study medicine in Brasilia and will need to be leaving soon.
Confronted with the oppression of the city, where he never quite fits in, and the distance of his native village from which he left twenty years ago, Justino finds himself condemned to an existence without place. As the days go by, he is overcome by a strong fever. During the night, a mysterious creature follows his footsteps. During the day, he fights to stay awake at work. But soon the tedious routine of the harbour is broken by the arrival of a new guard. Meanwhile, on television, the news talks about a wild animal lurking in the neighbourhood.
Best Actor and Fipresci Prize at Locarno 2019
TIFF 2019
94 mins / Brazil/France 2019 / Cert 12A
Amazon
Watch online - rent or buy from:
Amazon Prime
iTunes/Apple TV
Google Play
Watch online, rent only
Curzon Home Cinema
BFI Player
2011 Version Française (Short)
2009 Terras (documentary)
2006 Margem (documentary)
CAST | |
Justino | Regis Myrupu |
Vanessa | Rosa Peixoto |
Everton | Johnatan Sodré |
Jalmira | Kaisaro Jussara Brito |
André | Edmildo Vaz Pimentel |
Marta | Anunciata Teles Soares |
Wanderlei | Lourinelson Wladmir |
CREW | |
Director | Maya Da-Rin |
Script | Maya Da-Rin, Miguel Seabra |
Pedro Cesarino | |
Director of Photography | Bárbara Alvarez |
Sound | Felipe Schultz Mussel |
Breno Furtado. Romain Ozanne | |
Art Director | Ana Paula Cardoso |
Editor | Karen Akerman |
Sound Mix | Emmanuel Croset |
Assistant Director | Milena Times |
Custome Designer | Joana Gatis |
Make-up | Helena d’Araújo |
Producers | Maya Da-Rin, Leonardo Mecchi, |
Juliette Lepoutre | |
Co-producers | Pierre Menahem, Janine Jackowski, |
Jonas Dornbach | |
Production Company | Tamanduá Vermelho, |
Enquadramento Produções (Brazil) | |
Coproduction companies | Still Moving (France), |
Komplizen Film (Germany) | |
Executive Producer | Leonardo Mecchi |
2019 Brazil/France/Germany | BBFC Cert 12A |
1:1.85 / 5.1 | |
98 mins | |
In Tukano and Portuguese |
★★★★
'Brazilian filmmaker Maya Da-Rin’s allegorical mystery-thriller expertly melds tradition with modernity.'
'...Justino finds himself drifting into dream states when his illness hits, a switch that is not exactly signalled within a film that is tonally hot, hazy and feverish from the get-go, relentless in its impressive generation of mood through aggressively atmospheric sound design from Felippe Mussel, and sharp, sweaty night-time cinematography from Barbara Alvarez.’
'A compelling, richly researched film that builds upon Da-Rin’s documentary experience.’
Matt Turner, LITTLE WHITE LIES
'Maya Da-Rin’s subtle, poetic debut engages with the hidden lives of the Desana people of Brazil'
'The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film...dreamy film...deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil's indigenous people. There is poetry in it.'
Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN
★★★★★
‘The shadow of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who once compared the indigenous people of Brazil to animals living in a zoo and whose policies have accelerated the decimation of the Amazon rainforest, hangs over veteran documentarian Maya Da-Rin’s first fiction feature like a sickness. Da-Rin’s documentary credentials bring an authenticity that avoids easy exoticisation of indigenous people.’
Christopher Machell, CINEVUE
★★★★
‘A thoughtful and profound look at the struggle between natural and man-made worlds. Its slow pace and lingering atmosphere draw one in, allowing for the quiet moments to speak truth to power and leave a devastating impression.’
'Da-Rin stays away from cliche or idealisation, allowing for the inherent beauty in the indigenous culture to shine through. It is delicate, insightful and incredibly moving.'
'The Fever is a fantastic and poignant film that manages, through careful direction and superb storytelling, to leave a lasting impression.’
Joe Milo, THE UPCOMING
'Da-Rin’s poignant and pointed film...'
'Magical'
'The presence of the creature and its unexplained relationship to Justino provide further points of connection with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004), a work that blurs borders between dream and reality with similarly entrancing results.’
Jason Anderson, SIGHT & SOUND
★★★★★
'A stunning piece of cinematic work, Maya Da-Rin’s new feature feels like a combination of visual art and an allegorical documentary. If there is one hopeful thing to be taken from The Fever, it is that we will always grow back to our roots.’
Myrthe Leenders, LOUD AND CLEAR
‘Maya Da-Rin’s debut film is a dreamy, hazy arthouse wonder about a mysterious fever, exploring alienation, displacement, and identity with the Desana people of Brazil.’
'At Locarno Film Festival in 2019, The Fever won three awards, including Best Actor and the FIPRESCI prize for Best Film; now out in the UK, it’s ready to seep into your imagination and burrow its way into your subconscious.’
Nick Chen, DAZED Review/Interview with Maya Da-Rin - see more interviews with Maya Da-Rin in the 'Links' file.
★★★★★
‘With a thoughtful look at the clash of old and new, Maya Da-Rin has created something altogether beautiful.’ ‘This a thoughtful look at the clash of old and new. It looks at the threat to long-held traditions and asks whether the industrialised world is an improvement on what generations of indigenous Brazilians created and nurtured in forest communities.’
Dan Carier, CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL/WEST END EXTRA
‘The film is composed of many fixed shots. These shots allow us to appreciate superb sequences filmed between the containers on the port of Manaus, in the agitation of the city or in the sumptuous and green Brazilian forest.'
Hugues Porquier, BATTLE ROYAL WITH CHEESE
★★★★
‘The multi-award winning ‘THE FEVER’ has a haunting, dreamy quality. We are immediately immersed in the quiet, alienated world of the protagonist, who is surrounded by an environment dominated by containers, night sounds of the jungle, mysterious unexplained fevers…'
Corina J Poore, LATINO LIFE
'Poignant'
‘Built on rich soundscapes and calibrated camera interactions with the spaces determining with precision what’s seen or hidden in shadow or light, an otherworldly atmosphere permeates the film.’
'Da-Rin achieves a balanced examination that we seldom see in Latin American cinema. Subtly sensorial more than conventionally narrative, “The Fever” inhabits an ethereal plane that centres Indigenous beliefs and cultural practices not as primitive but valid modes of engagement.’
Carlos Aguilar, LOS ANGELES TIMES
'I loved Maya Da-Rin’s THE FEVER. A must-see.'
@devikagirgayi
CRITIC'S PICK
'Maya Da-Rin’s extraordinary film details the intimate life of an Indigenous family in the Brazilian city of Manaus.
“The Fever” colors in the experiences of Brazil’s Indigenous community through the casual racism Justino and Vanessa face at work, including taunts about the shapes of their eyes and ignorance about the diversity of Native languages. By showing us the world through Justino’s searching gaze, Da-Rin gives us an elusive but powerful sense of the limits of our own vision.'
Devika Girish, NEW YORK TIMES
'A Modern Day Fable About Modernity and Fabulation…‘Brazilian filmmaker Maya Da-Rin’s fiction feature debut is an entrancing portrait of a man adrift in an urban jungle.''In addition to its bold sound design, the film features striking work from DP Barbara Alvarez, whose embrace of dark, cloistered spaces that feel both expansive and claustrophobic, is here married with her ability (as with her work in 2015’s “The Second Mother” and 2016’s “Don’t Call Me Son”) to capture effortless family intimacies. But it is Myrupu’s beguiling performance that anchors this intimate and entrancing epic, a modern-day fable about the very concept of modernity and the promise of fabulation.'
Manuel Betancourt, VARIETY
'The insidious, devastating effects of capitalism, colonialism, and the Church—the three big Cs—on indigenous communities are considered…'
'An urgent portrait of a kind of life our desperate sprint toward modernity has incorrectly deemed as lesser-than.'
'When progress stops feeling like progress is what Da-Rin captures in “The Fever,” and fantastic lead actor Regis Myrupu is a conduit for a calamity that builds and builds.'
Roxana Hadadi, RogerEbert.com
'Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever takes place in Manaus, Brazil, where a particularly virulent and contagious mutation of Covid-19 first took hold, though the film was shot well before the virus dominated the city.'
'While in Justino’s quiet demeanor the film might be seen as veering close to indulging the stereotype of the stoic, silent indigenous person, Da-Rin’s approach to the story, inflected by collaboration from the indigenous actors in the main roles, Myrupu and Peixoto, defies tired representational means of humanizing oppressed natives through eliciting the universal values of the “family of man.'
Pat Brown, SLANT MAGAZINE
'Brazilian filmmaker Maya Da-Rin has long used her native country to examine the lines dividing the urban and the rural, and the people who live in the liminal states between, in documentaries such as Margin (2007) and Lands (2009). The natural world and the industrialized world are at odds once again. But it is to Da-Rin’s talent as a filmmaker that her political and ideological intent never overshadow this deceptively simple and astute tale of a sick man yearning for his home, and finally hearing the call of the wild.’
Josh Kupecki, AUSTIN CHRONICLE
'The Fever is essential cinema, demanding empathy and understanding without pity or didacticism, and spotlighting indigenous people with the attention to cultural specifics that few films bother elaborating.'
Beatrice Loayza, CINEMASCOPE
‘Exciting…innovating in storytelling and challenging our fields of perception and therefore our imagination. There is a curious symmetry, perhaps even a sense of justice, between the indigenous figure forced to abandon his hunting ground and the director – originally a documentarian – who resists a sense of cinematographic capture. There is also something political about refusing to photograph – to capture – these elements of the film. Not only does it create a gripping drama but it is an important statement about visual appropriation and exoticisation.'
Laura Davis, SIGHT & SOUND
★★★★1/2
'With subtlety and sensibility, taking advantage of the simplicity and humanity of the actors, the director Maya Da-Rin conceived one of the most convincing debut pieces of Latin American cinema in the past few years.’
Diego Battle, OTROCINES
‘In A Febre, engagement doesn’t mean receiving the world on one’s own terms. It means something beyond interpretation, sitting with someone, or something, accepting that there may be no answers, no second meanings nor additional layers of worth. This way, you resist the violence of silencing by imposition.’
Bessie Rubinstein, ANOTHER GAZE
‘The Fever is a Quiet, Heart-Breaking Story of Resilience in Brazil.'
'This is not just a wonderfully crafted, superb exercise in filmmaking, but a multilayered tale that seesaws between social realism and magic. It is a call to action, an unassuming manifesto hashed in the present tense but reverberating as a plea from a world already past us, a memoir of sorts.'
Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE
'Hovering between dream and reality, this film by director Maya Da-Rin takes us by the hand and guides us through the complex universe of Brazil's indigenous Desana community.'
CINEUROPA
Download pressbook
Download photos - tiff set
Download photos - jpg set
Quad Poster High Res jpg
Trailer on Youtube - link or embed
Download mp4 of trailer
Download trailer prores
Reclaim the Frame conversation with Maya Da-Rin on YouTube
Director/Cast interview 59 seconds (Square for Instagram/Twitter)
and 1 min 26 secs 16/9 for other Twitter/Facebook - download here
Square card for Twitter/Instagram etc
Mysteries of Nature: Maya Da-Rin Discusses "The Fever"The Brazilian filmmaker discusses her new film and declarations towards the indigenous people made by Brazil’s far-right government. MUBI Notebook Interview
Interview with Maya Da-Rin by Cineuropa
Interview with Maya Da-Rin by LATINO LIFE
Nick Chen, DAZED Review/Interview with Maya Da-Rin
Download the international pressbook
'We are always building a narrative or fabulating, telling a story somehow even if it’s abstract films’
Maya Da-Rin interview in FILMEXPLORER