Amazomania Review |The Colonised Talks Back In Disruptive Doc

Swedish filmmaker Nathan Grossman’s latest documentary Amazomania constructs an expedition and then turns it upside down. It’s a mission deep into the heart of the Amazon rainforest forms, only to be subsequently excavated for its troubling implications. Premiering in main competition at CPH: DOX 2026, the film gets to the roots of othering—a confrontation between white explorers and indigenous tribes. In 1996, a Swedish journalist, Erling Söderström, accompanied with a camera crew, ventured into the Amazon’s Javari Valley to attempt a peaceful dialogue with the Korubo tribe. He’d gone to resolve a conflict. Three decades on, footage from that excursion has been extensively shared for this documentary.

Amazomania is about our own gaze shot back, its layers of privilege unravelled. It indicts the fetish and voyeurism we inflict—how the white epistemology erodes native, indigenous subjectivity. We project our fantasies and delusions on those removed from our way of life and alien in belief systems. For the longest time, the Korubo just existed as a peculiarity within the white worldview. The film rebuts and challenges the totalising claims made by Erling about the indigenous tribe. It calls out his prejudices, jaundiced notions, his comfortable sanding over of the Korubo perspective to fit and cushion his lifestyle. Has he really been their friend as he propagates? Such an assertion is what made his unprecedented voluminous footage a global hit.

The footage unfolds with considerable scope and patience. Erling insists on his crew to cut down on the filming. But the camera keeps recording as Erling’s team dress up the Korubo. In a telling aside, Erling remarks it felt like the Korubo are discovering a new people. Another astonished journalist comments not being able to tell what era they’ve stepped into.

The two-fold Amazomania is structured to present first his thesis and then dent it. Erling’s gaze draws us in with romanticised wonder and exotic curiosity. He’s the stand-in for every colonising adventurer straying into foreign, uncharted territory. Thanks to him, the Korubo become a people captured in a white-profiteering gaze. In the second, potent chapter, the tribe finally gets to speak, unmediated and on its own terms. In 2023, Erling goes back to the Java Valley, driven to discover how the Korubo have adapted with the times. But the initially merry return takes a dark turn. The Korubo demand reparations, acknowledgement of their footage having contributed to Erling’s career. He built a reputation. However, what did it bring them?

Grossman traces both sides lobbying accusations, even as he’s careful to rightly give the upper hand to the tribe. Erling laments capitalist incursions into Korubo lives. He stresses on how they didn’t have such escalating wants earlier. Yet, he also sidesteps his own responsibility. Sydney, a Brazilian anthropologist who’d been on his first trip as well, sets things in perspective. He can dine in fancy cafes all over the world, but he’s stingy in giving the Korubo any money, much of which has materialised because of them. They ask for his footage proceeds. He refuses. The supposed friend and ally of the tribe might be their most damaging association. A telling moment in the footage has one of the tribals staring into the camera, poking what’s behind it. A latter admission underlines that the Korubo took the camera for a gun.

The tribe insists on a fair exchange, whereas Erling tries to wash his hands off. For decades, he leeched off on the success and attention he got off his Korubo documentation. But did his work shift how the Korubo are perceived at all? Historically, the needle doesn’t move. Now when the Korubo claim restitution, Erling won’t accept. It’s ironic when we think back to Erling’s mantra to his fellow wanderers on the 1996 trip that they must assist the Indians. Amazomania builds to a powerful, uneasy climax of necessary reckonings and historical accountability. Grossman juxtaposes Erling’s jauntiness with his small-mindedness, as his liberal mask is shredded.

However, it’d be remiss to note that the documentary, despite ostensibly being made in collaboration with the Korubo, has yet again a Swede recasting it all. The whiteness is inescapable in this project, calling for due reappraisal. What’s Grossman’s agenda here beyond uncloaking the colonial gaze? What endures here mostly is a meditation on narratives, ownership and representation. Other concerns like the depletion and systemic attack upon the native habitats are brushed past. Erling’s adventurous story opens the film, ultimately upstaged and rendered deeply questionable by his subject. Amazomania grows more tense, restless and loaded. By the time it wraps, it’s the Korubo holding primacy.