Across the Amazon, Indigenous guards are unarmed patrols that peacefully defend ancestral territories against threats like oil, mining and poaching. They use diverse technologies to monitor their lands, and when necessary, force out illegal operations and actors. Most of this daily work, which involves lengthy hikes and patient observation, goes unseen. This film depicts the process of the Indigenous Guard: its patrols, its watchful vigilance over the landscape, and its support of the community. Their work as guards helps ensure that destruction in the Amazon doesn’t advance, and that their community has the vital space it needs to live life on their own terms.
In powerful images, alternating between documentary observation and staged sequences, and dense soundscapes, Luiz Bolognesi documents the Indigenous community of the Yanomami and depicts their threatened natural environment in the Amazon rainforest.
There are 85 million cows in the Brazilian Amazon, which means three cows for each human dweller grazing today and area that was once forest. Less than fifty years ago, in the 1970s, the rainforest was intact. Since then, a portion the size of France has disappeared, 66% of which transformed into pastures. Much of this change is a consequence of government incentives that attracted thousands of farmers from southern lands. Cattle ranching became an economic and cultural banner of the Amazon, forging powerful politicians to defend it. In 2009, there was a game changer: the Public Prosecutor's Office sued large slaughterhouses, forcing them to supervise cattle supplying farms.
Explore the mysterious Amazon through the amazing IMAX experience. Amazon celebrates the beauty, vitality and wonder of the rapidly disappearing rain forest.
In Dark Green we follow conservationist and storyteller Paul Rosolie deep into the jungle of the Amazon, risking his life to learn more on this last remaining wilderness on earth.
Benito Arévalo is an onaya: a traditional healer in a Shipibo-Konibo community in Peruvian Amazonia. He explains something of the onaya tradition, and how he came to drink the plant medicine ayahuasca under his father's tutelage. Arévalo leads an ayahuasca ceremony for Westerners, and shares with us something of his understanding of the plants and the onaya tradition.
Herlinda Augustin is a Shipibo healer who lives with her family in Peruvian Amazonia. Will she and other healers be able to maintain their ancient tradition despite Western encroachment?
Four Westerners with various ailments travel to Peruvian Amazonia to drink ayahuasca, a traditional medicine renowned for its healing powers.
Steeped in the long oral tradition of Waorani storytelling, Gange Yeti shares her own coming-of-age story as a young Waorani woman living deep within the Amazon rainforest. Following Gange and her community for over 11 years, the film captures her transition from a quiet teenager into a confident young mother at a critical turning point for her culture and rainforest. As the granddaughter of one of the last Waorani elders that lived in complete isolation before outside contact, Gange is determined to capture her grandmother’s unique experience while she still can -- balancing school, motherhood, and tradition along the way.
Psychologist and anthropologist Alberto Villoldo talks with traditional healers of Madre de Dios, a department within in Peruvian Amazonia. They and Dr. Villoldo explain aspects of ayahuasca, a powerful, plant-based medicine of crucial importance.
The imagination of history in Ecuador never thought that oil, “its redeeming hope”, discovered in the Lago Agrio No. 1 well, was going to mean the beginning of the worst environmental catastrophe on the planet. Thirty years of operation and exploitation of the Texaco company, forever transformed the rivers and estuaries, the forests and the life of the indigenous communities in the northern Amazon of Ecuador.
It’s spring in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Uyantza festival is underway with the community celebrating all that the forest has to offer. Meanwhile, news is breaking around the world that a novel virus is spreading and a state of emergency is declared across the country. As people test positive for COVID-19 in the community, some families decide to leave and head deeper into the jungle. Disconnected from school, friends, the internet, and work, one family learns to reconnect with life in the forest. The children begin to unlearn the national curriculum, and instead are taught Indigenous knowledge that mainstream schools normally pass over. As COVID-19 wreaks havoc around the planet, the family reconnect to their ancestral ways, but as news arrives that Ecuador’s lockdown will end soon, will the family choose to return?
In the north of the state of Pará is the largest block of protected forests in the world; an area of Amazon rainforest the size of the UK and home to a multitude of stories. Indigenous people, ranchers, squatters, quilombolas, businessmen and politicians reflect in their own way the impacts of the possible expansion of the BR-163 into the forest, as far as the border with Suriname. The highway project was created at the time of the military dictatorship, and until today as a shadow over the region. But this is not a movie about a road. It is a film about the abysses that separate those who share the same land.
Sachamama is a retreat lodge in Peruvian Amazonia. There, Francisco Montes leads ayahuasca ceremonies for tourists seeking insight and healing.