As former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro formally launched their presidential campaigns this week, a new film coming out Friday documents the struggle of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon against the deforestation and destruction of their land by farmers and others illegally extracting resources. It is called The Territory.
For me, the journey behind The Territory really started when I read about the work of Neidinha Bandeira, the activist at the center of the film. I had read about her work protecting the Amazon rainforest, working to defend Indigenous lives, and just felt so inspired by this woman, who, against all odds, in a part of the world where everybody was against her, an extremely hostile environment, was proudly standing up in defense of this beautiful planet that we all have.
And so I reached out to her during the campaign, the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil, when we saw this really divisive, inflammatory rhetoric coming from the Bolsonaro campaign, and said, you know, “Look, it looks like your work is about to become much more difficult really quickly. Could I come and meet you in Brazil?” And that was sort of
— source democracynow.org | Aug 18, 2022