James Cameron Wants To Shoot 3D Film About Brazilian Tribes

Dropping the allegorical pretense of Avatar for a film that more directly tackles those same issues of social injustice, director James Cameron will be returning to Brazil this year to make a 3D documentary about indigenous people of the Amazon who oppose the construction of a large dam that will put their land at risk of flooding.

More after the break.

Yahoo! News has the news, including an excerpt of an interview Cameron did for the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, where he stated:

I want to return to meet some of the leaders of the Xikrin-Kayapo tribe who invited me. I want to take a 3D camera to film how they live, their culture.

We will be provided a glimpse at this in the special features for the forthcoming Avatar Special Edition DVD, which has a brief piece about the very topic that this movie will seek to examine in full.

It's admirable that Cameron is so persistent in fighting for this cause, and I suspect his message will be better conveyed through a documentary than a big-budget action spectacle like Avatar, where he will hopefully refrain from reducing it to something so simplistic and heavy-handed.

That said, would audiences really be willing to shell out extra cash to see this topic explored in 3D? There have been other documentaries where the extra dimension seems perfectly suited to the medium, such as Hubble 3D, Werner Herzog's upcoming Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Cameron's own Ghosts of the Abyss, but Cameron may be jumping the gun here. He's trying to fulfill a prophecy—his own, mind you—where every film is released in 3D, but right now, there aren't too many moviegoers who are convinced of its genre-defying practicality.