The Fever movie review & film summary (2021)

Da-Rin has spent years crafting films focused on the clash between industrialism and traditionalism in the Amazon rainforest, and the idea for “The Fever” arose out of the documentaries “Land” and “Margin.” “The Fever” is set in Manaus, the capital city of the Brazilian state Amazonas and the center of the Amazon Rainforest. In the late 1960s, the movie’s press notes explain, Brazil established Manaus as a Free Economic Zone, and along with the construction of new factories came stores, supermarkets, and open-air markets. The Manaus cargo port is a major stopping point for companies transporting goods not just to South America but around the world, and the shipping containers all stacked on top of each other like so many Lego blocks form a labyrinthine maze.

But the increased economic opportunity, as always, is double-edged. Manaus hasn’t grown with its population, resulting in urban sprawl and inadequate transportation and health care, and yet more people—in particular indigenous migrants relocating from villages destroyed by sustained deforestation—make it their home every day. That’s exactly what 45-year-old Justino (Myrupu) did. A member of the indigenous Desana people of the Upper Rio Negro region, which runs along the Brazil/Colombia border, he moved to Manaus decades ago to get a job. He started as a construction worker, then worked as a factory employee, then became a watchman, and for the past 20 years he’s held down employment as a security guard at the Manaus port.

Every day is the same. Long hours on his feet watching the containers, walking through the narrow pathways left between them, and checking that they’re locked. He barely speaks to anyone else. He carries a gun and wears a bulletproof vest, which hint at the possibility for violence, but he seems to spend most days totally alone. He takes two buses to get from his small one-room home, where he lives with his youngest daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), to the port; is it any wonder he begins to nod off at work? Da-Rin’s unfussy camerawork captures the contrasts Justino experiences in these myriad spaces. At the cold port, where Justino is practically an automaton, and in the packed bus, where Justino naps alongside other workers forced into similarly gruelingly long commutes. In his house, where various plastic bottles hold clean water and a hammock in which Justino sleeps hangs from the ceiling, and in the rainforest only steps away, from where Justino cuts down bunches of bananas for his family to eat as a baked treat. These are two worlds in Manaus, and Justino travels—or perhaps is trapped—between them.