Landscapes of Fabulation and Displacement: Cinema, Alterity and Cartography in Chuva É Cantoria na Aldeia dos Mortos

Abstract

This article reflects on experiences of displacement and migration in contemporary cinema, focusing on the film Chuva É Cantoria na Aldeia dos Mortos (The Dead and the Others; 2018), directed by Renée Messora and João Salaviza. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “fabulation,” the discussion examines how cinematic practices developed in contexts of deterritorialisation mobilise fabulation as a creative gesture emerging from encounters with alterity and an openness to other temporalities, affects, and epistemologies. The analysis emphasises the film’s creative process, characterised by a prolonged coexistence between the filmmakers and the Krahô Indigenous community in Tocantins, resulting in a ritualised, collaborative mode of filmmaking. Within this context, displacement appears as a constitutive condition of film form, the gaze, and the intersubjective relations that sustain the film. In dialogue with the concept of “diasporic space”, proposed by Avtar Brah (2005), it is argued that the film constructs a relational space in which boundaries are constantly negotiated, both for the filmmakers and for the characters. Finally, the article proposes an approach linking the film to the cartographic method, understanding the work as a practice of sensitive mapping grounded in collective assemblage. Cartography is therefore regarded as providing fertile conceptual tools for tracing collaborative cinematic practices in which subject and object co-emerge, and where cinema functions as a space for the production of the common and the reconfiguration of modes of being in the world.