50 minutes Colour
Producer and Director: Stephen Cross
Anthropologist: Peter Fry
Umbanda is a syncretic religious movement, combining elements from orthodox Catholicism with submerged African and indigenous Indian spiritual beliefs. In spite of past attempts to suppress it, Umbanda flourishes in the heterogeneous culture of contemporary urban Brazil. The film somewhat ambitiously seeks to give an exposition of the eclectic repertoire of the Umbanda movement. There is lengthy coverage of ritual performances, including interviews with mediums and their clients, which emphasise the role the movement plays in the management of personal malaise and affliction experienced as a by-product of change and urbanisation.
The concluding sequences of the Sea Goddess, Yemenya identified with the Virgin Mary show the annual Umbanda festival where half a million participants from all over the country assemble on the beaches of São Paulo. The film's strength lies in its graphic footage of spiritual possession and healing but it has been criticised for not providing a fuller account of the functioning of Umbanda groups, and the movement's articulation with the political authorities in Brazil.
R. Bastide, 1960. Les Religions Africaines au Brésil. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
D. Brown, 1979. `Umbanda and Class Relations in Brazil'. In M.L. Margolis and W.E. Carter (eds.), Brazil: Anthropological Perspectives. Essays in Honour of Charles Wagley. Columbia University Press, New York.
Jean Comaroff, 1978. Review of the film. RAIN, 26, pp. 67.
S. & R. Leacock, 1972. Spirits of the Deep: A Study of an Afro-Brazilian Cult. Doubleday Natural History Press, New York.
I.M. Lewis, 1971. Ecstatic Religion: an Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
R.J. Perelberg, 1980. `Umbanda and Psychoanalysis as Different Ways of Interpreting Mental Illness'. British Journal of Medical Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 323332.
E. Pressel, 1974. `Umbanda Trance and Possession in Sao Paulo, Brazil'. In I. Zaretsky (ed.), Trance, Healing and Hallucination, Part Two. Wiley-Interscience, U.S.A.
E. Willems, 1966. `Religious Mass Movements and Social Change in Brazil'. In E.N. Baklanoff (ed.), New Perspectives of Brazil. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville.
Article in T.V. Times, Vol. 89, No. 47, November 1977.
