The Territory: Documenting the Amazon’s destruction

There is no doubting who the good guys are in Alex Pritz’s exemplary documentary account of the violent turf war between the indigenous Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people of the Amazon rainforest and the thuggish invaders who seek to reduce the lush territory to farmland. There are, however, no easy answers or saleable happy endings here.

This National Geographic film, produced by Darren Aronofsky, diplomatically surveys the would-be interlopers. Sergio, a farmhand of many years, dreams of owning his own parcel of land. Martin, a settler who dreams of building roads through the millions of biodiverse square kilometres, hacks at plants and argues, not wrongly, that: “Every road in Brazil was built like this. First with a chainsaw. Then a tractor.”

There is much skulduggery at play. Pritz’s film carefully notes the correlation between anti-indigenous sentiment, emboldened illegal usurpers and the rhetoric of president Jair Bolsonaro.

An introductory title notes that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau now number perhaps 200 people, down from thousands in the 1980s, when the Brazilian government first “contacted” the tribe. It falls to Bitate, the brave 18-year-old Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau chosen to lead his community’s Jupau Association and long-time environmental activist Neidinha Bandeira to challenge the predominant colonising ideology using drone footage and social media platforms.

“The Amazon is not just the heart of Brazil, but of the whole world,” says Bitate.

Their work is dangerous. During one white-knuckle sequence, Bandeira receives a phone call that her daughter has been kidnapped. She subsequently builds thick walls around her house. Later, Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, a teacher, environmental activist, and member of the tribe, is found murdered on the side of the road.

Pritz collaborates commendably and sensitively with his subjects. Two tribe members, Tejubi Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and Tangae Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, are named as co-executive producers; the latter also served as co-cinematographer.

The awful sounds of destruction captured by sound designer Peter Albrechtsen recall Joseph Conrad’s assessment of Roger Casement’s Amazon Diaries, a journal that provides an extraordinary account of atrocities against tribal people in the Putumayo region in the northwest Amazon: “He could tell you things! Things I’ve tried to forget.”

Plus ça change.