A cadre of Western birdwatchers sail up a river in the Mato Grosso du Sul, in the central western region of Brazil. Amidst the verdant surrounds, the Guarani- Kaiowá, a race once indigenous to the region, appear on the riverbank. Their authentic dress and painted faces draw looks from the sightseers, at which the tribe fire a strangely feeble rejoinder of arrows. Satisfied they have tasted the authentic, the birdwatchers turn away – as do the ‘natives’, who change back into their denims. Taking the paltry purse they have earned for the display, they drive back to their native reserve, exotic wildlife returning to their cultural prison, dispossessed and suicidal… While Marco Bechis’ film portrays the sheer devastation of European colonisation and displacement upon Brazil’s indigenous cultures, it is never maudlin. Birdwatchers simply astounds in its cultural complexity and respect for the culturally divested. Its deft application of a lyrical disconnect to a dignified Guarani-Kaiowá’s plight reaps dividends; the disjunctive marriage of Domenico Zipoli’s baroque, soaring partitas with the distressed fabric of the indigenous diasporic lifestyle is simply breathtaking in its respectful but measured political counter-stance. There is little doubt with whom the film empathises: the stoic Nadio and his decision to leave the reservation and return to their Tekohà, the land of their ancestors, and not the land’s ‘owner’ Moreia, whose wife paid the Guarani-Kaiowá for the riverbank sham. Never relying on polemic, Bechis echoes Robert Stam, revealing how Western culture defines displaced aboriginal cultures, in order to exploit, from drunks to whores to cannibals. Birdwatchers proves that globalisation has found its métier in the exploitation of cheap labour; that those who force cultures to till the grounds that were originally dispelled never have to take responsibility for such cultural exploitation. But from Nadio’s eating of the very soil he stands on, to young Osvaldo's defiant final rebuke, Birdwatchers reveals that the legacy and politic of Glauber Rocha's Third Cinema fights on – and the Guarani-Kaiowá will not go gently into the night of extinction.