General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Gabriel and the Mountain

Gabriel and the Mountain (Portuguese: Gabriel e a Montanha) is a 2017 Brazilian-French drama directed by Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa that retraces the final months of Gabriel Buchmann, a Brazilian economist and the director's childhood friend, who died in 2009 on Mount Mulanje in Malawi at the end of a year-long backpacking journey.¹^•² It premiered in the Critics' Week section of the 2017 Festival de Cannes, where it was the only Brazilian feature selected that year and won two prizes.³

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa; screenplay with Lucas Paraizo and Kirill Mikhanovsky⁴
Subject	Gabriel Buchmann, 28, a Rio de Janeiro economist found dead in July 2009 on Mount Mulanje, Malawi, of hypothermia²
Cast	João Pedro Zappa as Gabriel, Caroline Abras as his girlfriend Cristina; local residents who knew Buchmann play themselves⁴
Cannes 2017	Critics' Week premiere; winner of the France 4 Visionary Award and the Gan Foundation Support for Distribution⁵
Runtime	131 minutes per Film at Lincoln Center and TV Brasil; 127 minutes per Screen Daily and Palace Films¹^•⁴
Brazil release	2 November 2017; 42,167 admissions and R$698,061.29 in box office per Ancine records⁶
US reception	Limited release June 15, 2018; Metascore 69, Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 84%⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Kenya, ten months into a year-long trip around the world. Gabriel (João Pedro Zappa) has finished his degree in Brazil, turned aside from a comfortable future, and set a start date for a Ph.D. in public policy at UCLA. Until then he travels poor on purpose, staying in local homes, riding packed minibuses, and handing out eighty percent of his daily budget to people who need it more than he does. He sends photos and voice notes home to his mother in Rio de Janeiro and to his girlfriend, Cristina (Caroline Abras), who is still in Brazil finishing her studies.

Kenya gives the film its first signature stretch. Gabriel spends time with a Maasai community, dresses as a Maasai among them, and then climbs Kilimanjaro at a pace that impresses everyone. On the summit he buries a photograph of his father, who died four years earlier. The trip is not only an adventure or a research project on poverty; it is a young man carrying grief up every mountain in sight.

From there the film rewinds no further but does flash to where the story ends: two Malawian men, Luka White and Bernard Nyove, pick their way through undergrowth on the slopes of Mount Mulanje and find Gabriel's body, missing for nineteen days, his belongings still with him. The men finding him on screen are the men who found him in life. Then it returns to the road, seventy days out.

Cristina flies in and travels with Gabriel through Tanzania and Zambia, and their relationship becomes the film's second act. She is the skeptic: she sees how much comfort Gabriel gives up willingly and how much risk he shrugs off, and the film lets her alarm arrive before anyone else's. Their days are a rhythm of haggling, border queues, hostels, and long conversations about what two wealthy Brazilians owe the places they pass through, and how much of Gabriel's project is empathy and how much is stubbornness. Eventually she flies home; Gabriel continues alone toward Malawi, his final destination before the flight back to Rio.

On Mount Mulanje, a guide tells Gabriel he does not have time to climb up and down safely, and Gabriel insists he will be fine going alone in sandals. The film stages the climb as a slow unwinding of everything the journey has been. Gabriel whoops and gambols up the rocky slopes like a kid let out of class, and then, as a storm gathers, his sandals fail him, the cold and the altitude close in, and he loses his bearings. The film does not show a death so much as a gap: it cuts away, and the gap is filled by the search, by Luka and Bernard finding his body, and by the aftermath. In the final movement the real people who knew him, villagers, guides, and friends, speak about Gabriel on camera, remembering him and re-enacting their encounters with the actors who play him. One friend reveals he named his own son after Gabriel. Barbosa stays silent about cause and motive, offering only the grief over his father and the possibility that Gabriel was not simply lost.

Characters

Gabriel Buchmann (João Pedro Zappa) is charming, generous, idealistic, and so certain of his own good intentions that he treats danger as a detail. Zappa plays him without irony and without sainthood, so that the quality that makes strangers take him in, his refusal to do anything the easy way, is the quality that kills him.

Cristina (Caroline Abras) is Gabriel's girlfriend and the film's conscience. She joins him mid-journey and increasingly questions the project he is so committed to. The real Cristina Reis consulted on the film and helped write the script, since she traveled through Tanzania and Zambia with the real Gabriel.

The supporting cast is largely the people Gabriel actually met: Luka White and Bernard Nyove, the Mulanje locals who found his body, play themselves, along with Kenyan, Tanzanian, Zambian, and Malawian residents recreating their weeks with him.

Interpretations and controversies

Because the film never explains how Gabriel died, viewers have argued about it since Cannes. The guide warned him, the storm came, his sandals failed: an accident. But Barbosa briefly foregrounds Gabriel's unprocessed grief for his father, buried on the summit of Kilimanjaro, and some critics read the final climb as at least flirting with suicide. The director's opacity is itself the point: the people who knew him on camera do not agree either.

Gabriel Buchmann's journey

In 2008, before beginning a doctorate in public policy for developing countries at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gabriel Buchmann set out on a budget trip around the world. He crossed 26 countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, intending to experience poverty directly by living as local residents did.² According to Screen Daily's Cannes review, he lived cheaply and attempted to give away 80% of his daily budget to people in need.⁴

In July 2009 his body was found on Mount Mulanje, the highest peak in Malawi at more than three thousand meters of altitude; he had died of hypothermia about ten days before his scheduled return to Brazil.²^•⁸ The circumstances of his death, accident or suicide, were left unresolved for his family and friends.² Because he was found with all his belongings, including diaries and film rolls, the filmmakers could reconstruct his route with what the Los Angeles Times called mile-marker accuracy across four countries.⁹

Production

Barbosa and Buchmann studied together from first grade through high school at Colégio de São Bento in Rio de Janeiro, and both went on to study economics at PUC-Rio before Barbosa left for film school in New York.² After Buchmann's death, his family and friends shared e-mails, photographs, and notebooks with Barbosa, who began writing the screenplay in 2011 and made a first research trip that year.²^•¹⁰

Casting by encounter. Rather than hold conventional auditions, Barbosa decided in 2015 to seek out the actual people Buchmann had met on his travels and have them reenact their encounters on the original locations. He explained that he could not have cast the roles any other way: "the casting had to be the one determined by Gabriel."³ The film mixes these non-professional participants, including tribesmen, hiking guides, safari operators, and bus drivers, with two professional Brazilian actors, João Pedro Zappa and Caroline Abras.⁴

The shoot lasted almost three months. A crew of 16 traveled 7,000 kilometers through four countries aboard an overland truck, following Buchmann's route through Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi.² Filming proceeded almost entirely in chronological order, except for the opening scene, which was shot last, and the Dana Salã safari sequence.³ The final scenes, depicting Buchmann's death on Mulanje, were the last ones shot.⁸

Financing came from Brazil's Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual and RioFilme, with the Franco-German channel Arte and France's Centre national du cinéma contributing 35% of the final budget after Arte responded to the French reception of Barbosa's debut feature Casa Grande (2014). Post-production was completed in France, which qualified the film for the Gan Foundation prize at Cannes.² Production companies included TV Zero and Damned Films.⁴

Style and reception

The film covers the last 70 days of Buchmann's journey, from his arrival in Kenya to his death on Mount Mulanje.² Critics frequently compared it to Sean Penn's Into the Wild, another account of a young traveler's death, while noting that Barbosa's use of the real people his friend met gives it a documentary texture.²^•⁴ A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it "a remarkable and full-throated elegy, a work of art that is full of life"; The Hollywood Reporter's Boyd van Hoeij was more reserved, arguing that the film does not question Buchmann's intentions and depicts him as sincere but naive.¹¹

The film opened in Brazil on 2 November 2017, six months after Cannes, and drew 42,167 theater admissions.⁸^•⁶ In France it had premiered on 30 August and attracted more than 80,000 spectators.² In the United States, Strand Releasing gave it a limited theatrical run on June 15, 2018, grossing $14.4K.⁷

Awards

At Cannes 2017 the film won the France 4 Visionary Award and the Gan Foundation Support for Distribution, and was nominated for the Critics' Week Grand Prize.⁵ It later won the Critics' Award for Best Brazilian Film at the 41st São Paulo International Film Festival and the APCA Trophy for Best Screenplay, and received nominations including Best Film at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema and the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress.⁵^•¹²

Buchmann's story was also told in print: the book Gabriel, as montanhas e o mundo (Autografia), by Alice Uchôa and Buchmann's mother Fátima Chaves de Melo Buchmann, was published around the time of the Brazilian release.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026