Trailer
Plot summary
Bill Markham, an engineer, moves his wife Jean and their children to Brazil, where a hydro-electric dam is being built. During a picnic at the edge of the jungle cleared for the dam, their young son Tommy strays from the family and a man of the Invisible People carries him off. Markham follows them into the forest but finds no trace of the boy. Ten years later, with the dam nearly finished, Markham is still searching for Tommy, who is now a young man of the Invisible People and goes by Tomme. The tribe's chief, who raised him, sees that Tomme has begun to notice girls and sets his coming-of-age rite in motion, warning that the vision quest to follow will take him toward the cannibalistic Fierce People.
Cast
- Mario Borgesas Costa
- Yara Vaneauas Young Heather
- William Rodriguezas Young Tommy
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Emerald Forest (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Because Embassy Pictures was struggling in the year of release, the film did not receive a traditional "For Your Consideration" advertising campaign, so Boorman promoted it himself by making free VHS copies available to Academy members at Los Angeles-area video rental stores. By the 2010s more than a million Oscar screeners were mailed out each year.
- Director John Boorman had said that he read the original L.A. Times article behind the story; in fact he had not, but was simply working from Pallenberg's screenplay.
- A possible additional source for The Emerald Forest is the book Wizard of the Upper Amazon (1971), an autobiographical account of Manuel Córdova-Rios' kidnapping when he was a teenager working for rubber cutters in the Amazon in the early 1900s.
