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The red carpet for Wednesday’s premiere of Tran Anh Hung’s “The Pot au Feu,” with Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel, was the scene of a demonstration in support of the land rights of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil.

The protest was led by the official delegation of “The Buriti Flower,” a film showing in the Un Certain Regard sidebar directed by Portugal’s João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora and sold by Films Boutique.

Appearing in front of the banks of photographers, the directors along with the actors wearing traditional dress, Francisco Hyjno Krahô, Debora Sodre, Luzia Cruwakwyj Krahô and Henrique Ihjac Krahô, unfurled a large banner with the slogan “Não ao Marco Temporal: The Future of Indigenous Lands in Brazil is Under Threat”.

One of the main actors, Francisco Hyjno Krahô traveled from his remote village to attend the premiere in Cannes. He explained to Variety the...

An indigenous teenager falls ill when he resists tribal duties and his destiny as a shaman in João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora’s ethnographically sincere “The Dead and the Others.” Handsomely shot on 16mm to draw out the region’s warm organic tones, the film is an admirable, often fascinating fictionalized portrait of the Krahô people of Brazil’s north-central state of Tocantins and their fight to preserve traditions too easily watered-down by contact with the outside world. A major problem however is that the directors, who don’t speak Krahô, had their nonprofessional performers improvise their lines, giving far more space to exposition than their amateur acting can bear. Less dialogue and greater reliance on conveying information visually would have distinguished “The Dead” from other indigenous fiction, though Un Certain Regard’s special jury prize ensures a modest festival life.

Fifteen-year-old Ihjãc (Henrique Ihjãc Krahô) hears his deceased...