Jaundiced cultural allegory dressed up as anthropological re-creation, How Tasty Was My little Frenchman slyly links Montaigne’s who-are-the-real-savages query to Brazil’s military dictatorship. Pereira draws from multiple historical sources— especially German explorer Hans Staden’s 1557 memoir—to tell the story of a French soldier’s experience as a captive of the cannibalistic Tupinambá tribe. “Pereira constructs a comic horror film in which sixteenth-century intertexts are read as current events in an analogy of colonialism with global capitalism. This film is Pereira’s response to Brazil’s building of the Trans-Amazon Highway, in the course of which contact with indigenous communities was made that threatened them with near extinction. The current destruction of habitat and native populations recalled to Pereira the traumas of colonization... The ingesting of foreign invaders thus becomes for Pereira a metaphor for indigenous resistance to global capitalism, the most recent form of economic colonization.” (Virginia Higginbotham)
