Preceded by short:The Hatters (Adrian Cooper, Brazil, 1984). (Chapeleiros). This film shot in a hat factory depicts an oppressive industrial production setup where abnormality becomes the norm. (24 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)What starts as a conventional ethnographic documentary, its title taken from Lévi-Strauss's memoir about Brazil, reveals itself to be anything but conventional, and in fact, a faux documentary. Taking as its subject one Arthur Alvaro de Noronha, a Paris-trained doctor in Brazil, the film reveals the good doctor's specialty to be the Heart of Darkness. A man who in Paris drank coffee with the Surrealists, in Brazil Dr. Arthur cavorts with witch doctors and cannibals, becoming an indigenous messiah. Working in an active Brazilian avant-garde of the seventies, Omar's technique not only takes a withering look at the notion of "tropicalism," but is a devilish undermining of the "witchcraft of cinema itself," as Robert Stam wrote. "We begin to suspect that we have been the dupes of an immense joke, as if Borges had slyly rewritten Conrad."