The Emerald Forest

1985 film by John Boorman

The Emerald Forest is a 1985 British adventure drama film set in the Brazilian rainforest, directed by John Boorman, written by Rospo Pallenberg, and starring Powers Boothe, Meg Foster, and Charley Boorman with supporting roles by Rui Polanah, Tetchie Agbayani, Dira Paes, Estee Chandler, and Eduardo Conde. The film tells the story of an American boy who is kidnapped by an indigenous tribe in the Amazon jungle. It is allegedly based on a true story, although the accuracy of this claim has been disputed. The film was screened out of competition at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, where it was chosen as the closing film. In promoting the film for awards competition, Boorman created the first Oscar screeners, but the film received no Academy Award nominations.

The film made its worldwide debut in France on June 25, 1985, where its recent Cannes buzz made it a sizeable hit. With 2,652,685 admissions nationwide, including 711,929 in Greater Paris, it was the 12th most popular film of the year in the country, and the 10th most popular in the capital region. In the United States, The Emerald Forest opened on July 5, 1985 via independent distributor Embassy Pictures, on a moderate 1,110 screens. It finished its run at the local box office with $24,468,550. The film opened in its native U. K. on August 23, 1985, in second place, but quickly fell off the charts, only drawing a lackluster £765,000 domestically.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 84% of 19 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The Emerald Forest was designated a Critics' Pick by a New York Times reviewer, who called it "compelling and richly atmospheric". Derek Malcolm of The Guardian wrote, "This simplicity of expression, combined with Boorman's usual sophisticated visual technique, makes it a genuine oddity. But, whatever its faults, it looks glorious, tells a fascinating story and is a piece of sheer cinema you have to see." In a negative review, Paul Attanasio of the Washington Post called it "long, wheezy tribute to the Noble Savage" and more of "a National Geographic special" than a proper film.

In addition to its Cannes selection, The Emerald Forest received three nominations at the 39th BAFTA Awards, for Best Cinematography (Philippe Rousselot), Best Original Music (Junior Homrich and Brian Gascoigne) and Best Makeup and Hair (Peter Frampton, Paul Engelen, Anna Dryhurst, Luis Michelotti and Beth Presares).

The film was promoted as "based on a true story". Critic Harlan Ellison in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching wrote that attempts by SCAN to get background information on the real story revealed that Rospo Pallenberg's original screenplay was based on several stories, including an article in the Los Angeles Times about a Peruvian labourer whose child had been abducted by a local Indian tribe and located sixteen years later almost fully assimilated. Pallenberg's agent told SCAN that while director John Boorman had said that he read the original L. A. Times article, in fact, he had not, but was simply working from Pallenberg's screenplay. According to SCAN, Boorman told NPR's All Things Considered that the son was still living with the tribe in 1985, and identified the tribe as "the Mayoruna", yet detailed anthropological studies of that tribe do not mention an adopted outsider. The story is an autobiographical account of Manuel Córdova Rios’ kidnapping when he was a teenager working for rubber cutters in the Amazon in the early 1900s. He was taken by a group of Native Amazonians to their remote Indian village. These Amazonians were fiercely independent and had fled into the interior because they refused to live under the subservient conditions imposed by the rubber barons at that time. Cordova Rios was incorporated into their tribe and describes a life strikingly similar to the one depicted in The Emerald Forest. Contrary to Ellison's conclusion, a contemporaneous January 1985 review in Variety magazine states up front that the movie is "[b]ased on an uncredited true story about a Peruvian whose son disappeared in the jungles of Brazil." The Los Angeles Times article also mentioned that the Peruvian child had at the time decided as an adult to stay with his adoptive tribe.