What will happen when the Brazilian rainforest is almost non-existent? Where will they end up in their almost limitless greed in order to be brutally exploited and only able to enrich themselves? That greedy pack of land robbers, loggers and gold diggers who irreversibly destroy the Amazon piece by piece. This question inevitably raises the full-length documentary “Amazonia Undercover”, which director, writer and producer Estêvão Ciavatta made from 2014 to 2019.
What is remarkable about this long-term production is, among other things, that none other than Walter Salles – director of such internationally successful and award-winning, sometimes Oscar-nominated feature films such as “Central Station” (1998), “Behind the Sun” (2001) or “Die Reise des Junge Che” (2004) – co-produced and was responsible for the documentary. “The heart of Brazil”, as it once said in the film about the threatened rainforest, is also Salles’ urgent concern.
[„Amazonia Undercover“, Dienstag, Arte, 20 Uhr 15, und in der Mediathek]
Over the course of the six years that director Ciavatta and his team have been working on the film, they have mainly accompanied an indigenous people living in the Amazon and their chief Juarez Saw Munduruku in the fight against the increasing clearing of the jungle and thus their very own habitat. It seems like David’s fight against Goliath. The overexploitation of Brazil’s rainforest continues unchanged and is in no way hindered by the Bolsonaro government.
“Environmental crime is part of everyday life”, one can hear, and that there is ultimately a lack of state control. Deforestation is spreading further, like a malignant cancerous tumor, as it is prosaically called in the voiceover, and it is also the construction of highways, almost a hundred hydroelectric power stations and gigantic dams that do the rest.
Parts of the rainforest are “public” and therefore free for speculators
To make matters worse, about one million square kilometers of rainforest are public, which means that this rainforest is neither registered anywhere nor recorded in books, nor is it under nature protection at all. It therefore does not belong to anyone, it is “free”. That calls speculators on the scene, who first clear the forest areas in order to then sell them at high prices with forged documents and owner deeds. This ruthless land grab is called “Grilagem” in Portuguese.
A few years ago, under the aegis of Juarez Saw Munduruku, several indigenous peoples came together to defend this land, their land. The camera accompanies them as they hang up demarcation signs in small family groups in the primeval forests to mark their territory. – They are always exposed to the mortal danger of encountering brutal loggers who, in the worst case, kill. In 2019, the criminals who cut the rainforest in an organized manner also border the Munduruku area.
“Amazonia Undercover” – which the Coletivo Audiovisual Munduruku joined as a further co-producer – accompanies and observes the sobering developments over the course of these six years. The result is a long-term documentary film that shows very directly how people still – or especially – deal with their livelihood in the 21st century.
One of the Brazilian scientists and researchers interviewed in São Paulo and Brasilia says at one point: “This wonderful earth does not need humans – but humans need this earth.” The documentary “Amazonia Undercover”, which is well worth seeing, shows painfully that the beast is human even today does not act accordingly. But on the contrary.
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