Matto Grosso’s path to obscurity may have been set by several factors: it was not feature length, it was not a financial success, and, most importantly, it was not easy to categorize, as it was a mix of science and adventure. After early screenings it became a forgotten Museum artifact. Now, having completed a restoration of the 16mm print, the Penn Museum has re-released the film, which is accompanied by two extras: the surviving tinted 35mm nitrate parts of the film held by Vincenzo Petrullo until his death in 1991, and a copy of the short film The Hoax (1932). The Hoax (earlier thought to be titled The Kid), directed by Floyd Crosby during the same expedition, was rediscovered in 2010 in the collection of the Smithsonian Human Studies Film Archive.
In 2011, thanks to a collaboration with Dr. Greg Urban of the Department of Anthropology at Penn, Brazilian anthropologist Dr. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes took the films to the village of Tadirimana to show them to a group of Bororo people. Novaes told us that the films were well received, with lively discussion taking place about the animals in the film. She and her colleague Edgar Teodoro da Cunha learned that the village where the film was made was likely Pogubu Çoreu, which is located about 10 km from the city of Fátima. There was further excitement when, as Novaes described, “Raimundo Itogoga, a great Bororo leader from the village of Tadarimana…identified [a] man with face paint as a significant elder, a bari called Tiriacu Areguiri Ópogoga.” With the help of Beatriz Kiga, the Brazilian anthropologists were able to obtain translations of the Boe Wadáru (Bororo) dialogue in the film. This was an unexpected benefit for all involved with the film: an opportunity to return an artifact of local history to the communities where it was made.