Summary
Writer-director Otakar Fuka is associated primarily with the attempts of screenwriters from the “normalisation” era of Soviet entrenchment following the Warsaw Pact invasion to entertain audiences with genre films. Besides a number of detective stories, the experienced filmmaker also shot an ambitious sci-fi movie, in which he collaborated on the script with Irena Drahoňovská and the co-author of Fuka’s previous film, Svědectví mrtvých očí (The Evidence Given by Dead Eyes) – Drahoslav Makovička. The protagonist of this adventure film, Doctor Junek, reveals the true identity of the beautiful Zuzana in this mystery story. She is actually an alien, who is seeking the eponymous plant extract with her partner. Bororo is a substance produced by Brazilian Indians and it could help the members of the alien race cure the disease that they have spread to their home planet from Earth. However, the malevolent Kraus – a former Nazi who wants the drug for himself – stands in the way of Junek and his new extra-terrestrial-researcher friends… Akce Bororo (Bororo Operation) brings together various crowd-pleasing elements: a sci-fi fantasy theme and Nazis surviving somewhere in South America are combined with an attractive Brazilian setting, where the curious Junek eventually goes on a quest to find the miraculous substance. Although the filmmakers tried to evoke the illusion of shooting in an exotic foreign location solely with the aid of archive documentary footage, the overall credibility of the story also owes a lot to the notes of the Czech explorer Alberto Vojtěch Frič. Naturally, this intellectually and stylistically simple film from 1972 cannot compete with American or British films of the same era that were similar in terms of genre and theme. Nonetheless, it bears comparison with Soviet sci-fi adventures of the 1970s. Svatopluk Matyáš played the role of Junek and Oto Ševčík took the part of the villainous Kraus. The Slovak actress Božidara Turzonovová gave an absorbing performance as the attractive alien Ori-Ana.
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