The Uru-euwau-wau people of the Amazon rainforest have only one weapon: media attention. Without it, landgrabbers will keep penetrating further into their land in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.
The TerritoryThe world premiere of “The Uru-euwau-wau-wau” at Sundance has raised the profile of the Uru-euwau-wau-wau’s struggle and brought it to a new level. This documentary was shot over many years in collaboration and with the Urueu-wau–wau. It explores the issues facing the indigenous group as well as humanity.
“The Uru-eu-wau-wau indigenous territory is important for the whole planet,” says Neidinha Suruí, a defender of the Uru-eu-wau-wau who is one of the main characters in the documentary. “Because of its nature and biodiversity and because it’s fighting climate change… it’s super important.”
Only 190 Uru-euwau-wau are still alive. They are outnumbered and outgunned daily by armed intruders who have been burning large areas of rainforest to extract minerals, logging, or for homesteading cattle. Today, the Urueu-wauwau cause received a welcome boost from Deadline reporting that National Geographic had acquired it. The TerritoryDistribution guarantees a larger platform for the Uru story.
“We are honored to bring the story of the Uru-eu-wau-wau people to the world,”Carolyn Bernstein, National Geographic’s executive vice president for global scripted content, and documentary films, stated this. “and help further the conversation and raise awareness around the endangered Amazon rainforest and its indigenous people.”
Bernstein also praised Alex Pritz’s work, who makes his directorial debut in this role. The Territory. He was not the first filmmaker to enter the Amazon rainforest. Deadline is told by Pritz that it was important to him for the Urueuwau-wau to be centrally involved in making these films. The Territory.
“It had to feel good every step of the way to everybody involved,” Pritz tells Deadline, “or it wasn’t worth doing at all.”
The Uru-euwau-wau lived in complete isolation from the Brazilian government until the 1980s. It was difficult to explain the concept and purpose of a documentary film to elders in the community who didn’t have a frame of reference.
“The idea of advocacy and news media, journalism, a lot of these things were really quite foreign,” Pritz recalls. “And the idea that somebody would follow you around with a camera for a couple of years was like, ‘OK, but what does that mean, really? And then what’s the point of it?’ We really felt in order to proceed with the process of informed consent with this community, we had to open up our toolkit and explain and show and teach and share what film meant to us.”
Pritz says younger members of the Uru, like 18-year-old Bitaté, intuitively understood the idea.
“They kind of came to the elders,” Pritz explains, “and said, ‘Look, we really think this film is going to be an exciting and important thing. Let’s do it.’”
In short order, Bitaté was operating a drone camera, documenting incursions by non-indigenous Brazilians hungry for their land. Filmmakers feared that Covid would spread to the Uru so they provided equipment to allow the Uru to film themselves.
“The media is a huge tool,” Pritz observes, “and I’m excited that they’ve been picking it up for themselves… We see this film as the beginning of a much larger collaboration between media and this community.”
Pritz and his team also filmed with settlers — the ones clearing land that doesn’t belong to them, acre after acre. At the Urueuwau-wau’s insistence, that was.
“They really pushed us,” Pritz remembers, “and said, ‘Look, if you want to understand this story in a different way or shed some light on the situation more generally, talk to people on the other side who are the ones invading us.’”
Pritz believes that many Brazilian settlers are influenced in part by American Western stories.
“They see themselves as the heroes of this story. They are the virtuous pioneers that are creating something out of nothing, in their minds,”He observes. “Obviously, the rainforest is not nothing and it’s home to people and animals and all sorts of things. But they’re following this tired Western colonial story that land is nothing, it is a blank slate until it is found, demarcated along these Cartesian coordinates and turned into private property, and only then does it become something. And they see themselves as the first step in that creation of private property.”
Jair Bolsonaro is often compared with Donald Trump. He has also openly expressed hostility towards the needs of indigenous peoples, and has endorsed the deforestation in vast tracts of Amazon.
“These invaders and farmers, most of them, they feel very supported and empowered by the current government in Brazil, the current president,” notes the film’s Brazilian producer, Gabriel Uchida. “So, they were just fine with showing us illegal stuff that they were doing.”
Brazilian law protects the land of Uru-euwau-wau, and other indigenous groups. It’s on paper.
“There’s no law enforcement there,” Uchida says. “In one of the scenes of the film Neidinha and activists go to the guy who works for the federal agency and he says something like, ‘What should I do? Go there and fight the invaders? I can do nothing.’ Year by year, there are just more and more invaders. Nowadays, it’s a nightmare because honestly, there’s not one single week that we have peace.”
Neidinha Suruí grew up in the rainforest, her father a rubber tapper at a time before the Uru-eu-wau-wau land came under federal protection. Her life, as a prominent defender Uru-euwauwau interests has been threatened by those who seek to control Uru land. Deadline spoke with her in Brazil from her home, which she had to convert into a defense structure.
“It’s like a fortress, high, high walls and CCTV,” Suruí notes, “and I had to make it that way because of this genocide agenda that is affecting human rights activists and environmental activists in Brazil.”
Bolsonaro will be running for reelection in the latter part of this year. Suruí makes it clear what she thinks about the right-wing politician.
“His speeches, his agenda and also his supporters — they’re supporting deforestation and the death of animals… and also the death of indigenous peoples,”She said. “It is a tragedy for the whole world, not only for Brazil. He’s promoting hate, not love. He’s promoting illegal activities. It’s terrible to talk about it… I can tell you that I love horror movies. But not a single horror movie would be worse than Bolsonaro’s axe to the forest… I consider him the worst nightmare for the Amazon.”
Amazing photography The TerritoryIt helps to reveal the hidden life and potential dangers of the rainforest.
“I really wanted visually to be able to move between the big and the small, because this story is about the climate and about the planet and these really huge forces, the rise of populist authoritarianism and these huge themes — manifest destiny,” Pritz comments. “But it’s also about the individual characters… and we wanted to make a film that was able to move between the macro level forces and the micro level people and regional conflicts that encapsulates it. Trying to build a visual language where we can move between satellite imagery of the continent where you see, over 30 years, how many trees have been lost and what this really looks like and then go all the way down to like one caterpillar and really just focus on that.”
Suruí helps sum up the purpose of The Territory.
“I hope people can realize how dangerous it is to lose the rainforest and the risks that indigenous peoples and activists are facing here,”She said. “I hope they understand that this fight is to save the forests and the planet.”