Flight od the Crocodile – Ruy Cinatti’s Timor

Director: Fernando Vendrell

Feature-film documentary, 2024
71 min – Digital – 16:9 – B&W/Color

Between 1946 and 1974, Ruy Cinatti lives a nomadic experience, getting closer to the people of East Timor and their territory.

The cultural identity he aims to preserve is threatened by colonial oppression and the decline of the Portuguese Empire.

Rejecting this, Ruy Cinatti carried out ethnographic surveys and anthropological research: he recorded oral history, photographed 

and filmed people and landscapes, documented rituals and made blood pacts with tribal chiefs -Liurais- in order to access sacred places. He becomes Timorese.

With several voices that intertwine and relate as a polyphony with the poems and the heterogeneity of images from the author’s 

archive – Flight of the Crocodile evokes Ruy Cinatti through visual and sound harmonies, full of complexity, emotion and beauty, creating meanings and rhymes.

Festivais

Doc Lisboa – World Premiere