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A network of government-backed farmers is eating into indigenous territory in the Brazilian rainforest, but a local activist and his team are fighting back with a video camera as a weapon.
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New documentary The Territory follows the efforts of
the Indigenous Amazon community called Uru-eu-wau-wau to protect their land
from aggressive deforestation efforts.
After winning both the Audience Award and a Special Jury
Award for Craft at Sundance, the movie was acquired by National Geographic,
which released it last week to kick off an awards season run.
The film has won plaudits for portraying different sides of
the conflict, a decision made by the Uru-eu-wau-wau themselves.
“‘If we want to do something bigger and deeper and more honest, go talk to the people that are committing these acts of violence and destruction, because we’re not the cause of this conflict,’” director Alex Pritz, was told by community leaders (reported by TIME). “‘Because it does a disservice to those people that are on the frontlines dealing with this messy, convoluted, complex conflict to paint things in terms that are too reductionist or too simplistic.’’
“The protagonists of our film see the rainforest in very
different ways,” Pritz told Filmmaker. “Understanding these perspective differences and illustrating them through the
film’s cinematography was the central creative challenge in shooting this film.
For scenes involving Indigenous participants, we often shot handheld and
employed a loose and fluid aesthetic on wider focal lengths. When shooting with
the farmer/settlers, we would frequently switch to a tripod with a longer zoom
lens to build a more mechanical feeling to our cinematography.”
Gaining trust among the community was essential and the
filmmakers did so by working with Neidinha Bandeira, a Brazilian environmental
activist who has received death threats because of her work. Once she knew that
the story was in good hands with the Territory team, she connected them with
Bitatè Uru-eu-wau-wau, 22, the president of the Jupaú Association, an
Indigenous leadership body that engages with the government.
Bitaté was already working with other Uru Eu Wau Wau members
to set up drones and additional cameras to document illegal settlers in their
home.
“Bitate was interested in drones and what they were capable
of as far as his community before we arrived,” Pritz relates at Moveablefeast. “He had had training on how to use drones and the World Wildlife Foundation had
given them several drone packages, so we were saying to ourselves, “Wow, this
is really interesting. The thing that we’re doing is the thing they find really
powerful. Is there a way to merge this and blend it?”
However, many other members of the community had little to
no idea about what even a camera was.
“So the next time I came, we brought some small cameras with
us, and just did some really basic participatory video workshops,” Pritz tells
The Film Stage. "The elders had never seen a film before. So how do you ask somebody if they
want to be part of a film if they don’t know what a film is? Just super basic
stuff, not really planning to use any of it, just to open up a more honest
conversation about who I am and what I’m trying to do, as well as to impress
upon people what they were entrusting me with.”
This dramatically changed when in August 2020, Covid-19
prevented Pritz and his team from filming in the rainforest. So much trust had been established by that
point, though, that the Uru-eu-wau-wau simply asked for more equipment to
finish the filming themselves.
“Bitate told us basically, ‘Send us better camera equipment,
send us lav mics,’” Pritz reports to IndieWire. “’We have this little stuff that’s been donated by NGOs, but we want
professional equipment if we’re going to keep shooting this for you while you
aren’t allowed to enter our territory.’”
In the New York Times,
he elaborates, “I brought a bunch of other camera kits and audio equipment,
sanitized them and left them at the edge of the villages. People would pick up
the cameras, and we would communicate over WhatsApp about any technical
problems. The scene that I think makes the whole film was shot by Tangãi Uru Eu
Wau Wau, my co-cinematographer: their arrest of an invader. I have shot a lot
of surveillance missions myself, and when we saw the footage coming from
Tangãi, it was so clear from the first frame that his was just plain better.
You felt the chaos and tension in a way that I just wasn’t capturing.”
Not only did dropping off camera kits at the edge of the
rainforest for the Uru-eu-wau-wau to claim ultimately keep the production
going, “but the variety of perspectives yields an unusually rich overview of
competing interests that make environmental crises so difficult to resolve yet
put potential solutions within grasp when it can be appreciated where
everyone’s coming from,” finds Stephen Saito.
Cinematography credit is shared between Pritz and Tangãi Uru
Eu Wau Wau; Bitatè will become the first member of the Uru-eu-wau wau to attend
college this fall, where he will study journalism.
The Uru Eu Wau Wau are also credited as co-producers and so
will receive an equal portion of direct profits of the film.
Marianna Olinger, the film’s impact producer, has been
spearheading efforts to help build a multimedia and cultural center in the
Uru-eu wau-wau territory using both traditional architecture and modern
designs, reports TIME. The center will include a production studio, podcasting
area, equipment storage, and editing bays—designed for the Uru-eu-wau-wau to
keep telling their own stories.
“It’s much bigger than it was originally envisioned,” Pritz
said. “It’s a whole other chapter in this impact campaign.”
The project’s producer is Protoza Pictures, the production
outfit of Darren Aronofsky who tells IndieWire that the story fitted with his
own environmentally-conscious non-fiction projects (like Welcome to Earth) and
his own directorial work like Noah and the allegorical creation story Mother!.
“I was trying to point out that there’s a story about
environmentalism that’s the fourth one in the Bible, something that’s been a
part of our literature and history for a long time,” he says, about Noah.
“I was trying to depoliticize it in whatever way I could.
“Mother! was very much an outgrowth of what I was
reading, thinking, and seeing happen to the environment,” he said. “I just
wanted to create a howl as loud as I possibly could.”
In the same interview, Pritz says the Protozoa team
encouraged him to push the story in a more cinematic direction. “I started to
think of it as a Western more than a documentary,” he says. “It was an
extremely hostile environment where people are working to protect the
environment, but we had to work both sides of the conflict, which was a fine
line to straddle.”
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