85 min | PG | August 19, 2022 | National Geographic Documentary Films
The Uru-eu-wau-wau are a few hundred people guarding a stretch of Amazon rainforest that ranchers and land grabbers want carved up and burned. When the pandemic locks the filmmakers out, the tribe picks up the cameras and shoots the invasion themselves. The result is a thriller where the stakes are the planet’s lungs.
The Uru-eu-wau-wau are an Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon. A few hundred survivors hold a protected territory that settlers and ranchers want to clear and sell. Bitaté, a young man, inherits leadership of a tribe under siege. The film tracks two campaigns at once. One is the slow legal and physical defense of the land. The other is the organized invasion by men who believe the forest belongs to whoever clears it first.
Bitaté Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leads with a calm that hides how young he is. He learns the law, the press, and the surveillance drone because survival now demands all three. Neidinha Bandeira, an activist who has fought for the tribe for decades, carries the exhaustion of someone who has buried allies and expects to bury more. Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau patrols the boundary on foot and reads the ground for fresh cuts and footprints. The settlers appear too, and the film lets them speak. They are poor men who have been told that burning the Amazon is their birthright.
Alex Pritz directs his first feature and makes a structural choice that defines it. When the pandemic closes the territory to outsiders, he hands the cameras to the Uru-eu-wau-wau and lets them film their own surveillance operation. The footage they capture is rougher and more intimate than anything a visiting crew could stage. Pritz cuts between aerial shots of intact canopy and the smoking scars where the forest has been torched. The sound design pushes the insects and birds forward until the silence of a cleared field becomes its own kind of violence. The editing builds the dread of a thriller without inventing a single beat.
The film refuses the comfort of distance. It does not treat the rainforest as scenery or the Uru-eu-wau-wau as symbols. It treats them as people defending their home against a state that has stopped enforcing its own laws. The invasion is not a metaphor for ecological collapse. It is the collapse, happening in real time, to specific people with names. Pritz trusts that the facts on the ground are enraging enough without a narrator to underline them.