There are no movie stars in Brazil. When a local comedy show asked people to list the most famous Brazilians, the top three were Gisele Bundchen, Pele, and Blanka — the green ogre from Street Fighter 2 who got his powers from the bite of an Amazonian electric eel. So far in 2012, not a single Brazilian-made movie has cracked the top ten in the country’s own box office—in fact, to find a domestic hit, you have to go all the way down to the romantic comedy E Ai…Comeu?, which to date has made about half of as many reals as Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. But Brazil does have soap stars. And at the Amazonas Film Festival in Manaus, Brazil — the heart of the Amazon — soap stars, dozens and dozens of them, all handsome and cheerful and thrilled by their own fame, were the main event.

That a film festival celebrates soap stars makes no sense, until it does. One of the major reasons for trekking these TV celebrities out to Manaus is to lure schoolchildren to attend the free festival where, between hooting hellos at their idols, they watch a movie, fall in love with film and kickstart the next generation of Brazilian cinema.

The second reason for the soap star deluge is to make the rest of the country pay attention to Manaus. Until very recently, the 2.2 million capital city of the Amazon was only accessible by plane and boat; most of the celebrities in attendance from the southern metropolises of Rio and Sao Paulo had never been there at all. It takes longer to drive from Rio to Manaus than it does to drive from Los Angeles to New York, and the cultural distance between the two is so vast…