One Part Documentary, One Part Fiction

In July 2009, the body of a young Brazilian named Gabriel Buchmann was found near a mountain trail in Malawi. He had been taking a year to travel the world before starting a graduate program at UCLA, and he was expecting to fly home to Rio de Janeiro shortly. The last months of Buchmann’s life are the subject of “Gabriel and the Mountain,” a film by his friend Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa that is a perceptive and poetic hybrid of documentary and fiction. It both captures and gently critiques Buchmann’s free-spirited, adventurous sensibility.

Gabriel is played by an impish, energetic actor named João Pedro Zappa, and his girlfriend, Cristina Reis — who meets Gabriel in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and accompanies him for part of his journey — is played by Caroline Abras, also a professional. With one other exception, everybody else in the movie is someone who knew Gabriel, playing him- or herself. The people he met along the way re-enact their encounters, which are mostly friendly but occasionally tense. They also reminisce about him in on- and off-camera interviews. Barbosa’s use of photographs taken by Gabriel himself, and of passages from letters he wrote to his family in Brazil, heightens the uncanny sense of his simultaneous presence and absence.

Early on, during a stay at a village in Kenya, Gabriel hears some children referring to him as mzungu, which means white man. “But I’m not,” he says. “I’m from Brazil. It’s more complicated!” Racial identity in Brazil is certainly that, and so are the dynamics of power and privilege that inevitably arise when relatively wealthy people travel in mostly poor places. Gabriel is aware of those contradictions, and also frustrated by them.

His disdain for “tourism” — his desire for empathy, equality and “sustainability” in his relations with the residents of the places he visits — is sincere, and also patently naive. His itinerary includes Mount Kilimanjaro, Victoria Falls and a safari in the Serengeti, and he spends a fair amount of time haggling with guides and drivers. He throws a small tantrum when the safari leader won’t take him to see migrating wildebeest.

But the rough edges and annoying aspects of his temperament are part of Gabriel’s charm, and they lend credibility to Barbosa’s portrait. The chapters dealing with Christina’s visit are like a novel in miniature. The couple’s squabbles and tender moments, the way they alternate between ease and unease in each other’s company, are interesting in their own right, but also connect with the larger ideas the film sets out to explore. An extended scene on a bus in Tanzania in which Gabriel and Christina argue about the role of state investment in economic development (and also about the future of their relationship) is a tour de force. The camera and the performers capture unstated nuances of feeling, while registering the wonderful absurdity of the situation.

Gabriel’s sense of the absurd and his willingness to recognize his own foolishness make him a worthwhile companion, even though, the film suggests, his stubborn insistence on doing things his own way may have cost him his life. It is easy enough to poke holes in his romantic view of himself and the world, but it’s also hard to deny the infectious humanism that drove him.

“Gabriel and the Mountain” finds a form for that impulse, a way to appreciate and make sense of it. More than a simple tribute or a fond remembrance, it is a remarkable and full-throated elegy, a work of art that is full of life.

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Production Notes

‘Gabriel and the Mountain’

Not rated.

In English, Portuguese, Swahili, Chichewa and French, with English subtitles.

Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes.