Walachai

Walachai. Dir. Rejane Zilles. Brazil, 2009. Dur.: 75 min.

Rejane Zilles's documentary film Walachai begins with beautiful, sweeping images of Southern Brazil. As we learn during the course of the film, Walachai is among a number of small settlements in Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, that are made up of inhabitants of German descent. Others include Jamerthal, Batatenthal, and Frankenthal. One of the main themes of this documentary is the fact that the people of Walachai speak a special dialect derived from German. In fact, most of the children in this community only learn Portuguese when they start school. Thus the meaning of the word 'Walachai'-''terra distante de todo"-is true in the sense of distance from their ancestors in Germany and also linguistic and some cultural distance from Brazil. However, as many of those interviewed in the film attest, they consider themselves Brazilian, "Eu sou brasileiro." In this documentary, Rejane Zilles returns to her hometown from which she left at nine years of age and interviews members of this small, tight-knit community. Some of the interviews are in Portuguese and others are in the German dialect and subtitled. Zilles includes the names of those interviewed on screen-Bertha Straussberger, Gereon Closs, Benno Wendling, Arsênio Schaab, Liane Klein, Natália Wendling, and Helga Kieling, to name a few.

The first woman that Zilles interviews is Bertha Straussberger, who is ninety-one years old and rings the tower bells every morning and has been weeding in the cemetery for fifty-seven years. This...