Documentaries portray the Amazon’s urgent problems through the eyes of the communities affected

In an online seminar hosted by FAPESP, researchers discussed how social subjects who live in the Amazon are portrayed by documentaries about the impact of extractivism and large dams.

By Maria Fernanda Ziegler  |  Agência FAPESP – In a territory belonging to the Munduruku near Jacareacanga, a town in Pará state, North Brazil, there is unusually strong demand for children’s wheelchairs. A medical inquiry found the proximate cause to be high levels of mercury in the blood of the people who live in the area, leading to irreversible neurological problems in adults as well as children. 

The Munduruku are being poisoned by mercury illegally left in the Tapajós River by wildcat gold prospectors, whose activities are also contaminating other rivers and fish throughout the Amazon. The neurological syndrome manifested by these Indigenous people is known as Minamata disease, after a fishing town in Japan where a chemical factory released mercury into the bay for decades, causing many deaths and deformities. The disease was classified as such in the 1950s. Official government recognition of the disease came only in 1968 and an important lawsuit for compensation was won by the victims in 1973. Japan’s Supreme Court declared the government jointly responsible for the catastrophe in a decision handed down in 2004.

The two stories are told in the documentary Amazônia, a nova Minamata? (“Amazonia – a new Minamata?”). Directed by Jorge Bodanzky, the film will be screened in October. It includes testimony by Dr. Erik Jennings Simões, a neurosurgeon who has cared for Indigenous people in Pará for 20 years, and Alessandra Munduruku, an Indigenous leader and environmental activist. “People must know about what’s happening. That’s why we don’t stop fighting. You’re killing our children,” Alessandra says at one point in the film, during a demonstration at Brazil’s National Congress.

“We already knew about contamination of the rivers in the Amazon Basin by mercury, but I personally had no idea of the magnitude of this irreversible disaster,” Bodanzky said during the first seminar in the series “The Amazon in images and movement: the stories of extractivism in the Amazon as seen through the lenses of Brazilian documentary makers”, hosted by FAPESP on September 15. 

“Mercury attacks the neurological system. It contaminates placenta and babies are born with this poison in their blood. You can’t see or smell mercury. Its effects take time to appear. Sometimes people live in a place contaminated by mercury for 30 years and the poisoning isn’t visible,”

The purpose of the series of three webinars is to discuss how intensive extraction of natural resources and the impact of huge hydropower complexes in the Amazon have been exposed in powerful documentaries disseminated at home and abroad.

They were proposed by researchers engaged in the project “After the hydropower complexes: social and environmental processes occurring after the construction of Belo Monte, Jirau and Santo Antônio in the Brazilian Amazon”, supported by FAPESP under the aegis of its São Paulo Excellence Chair (SPEC) program.

“We’re producing knowledge about the dams’ social and environmental impacts, but these hydropower complexes are part of a much larger historical process. The documentary films play a central role in this production by showing how natural resources have been extracted in the region since the era of the rubber boom and including today’s wildcat mining [garimpo], in order to inform the general public about what’s happening in the Amazon and contribute to the academic research agenda concerning the region,” said Emilio Moran, a professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and principal investigator for the SPEC project.

Collaboration between the documentary makers and the communities affected by the dams is vitally important, the webinar participants stressed. Additional measures are required, they argued, including facilities and training in film-making and communication in the region so that the social lives of the region’s Indigenous, forest-dwelling and riverine communities can be seen from the viewpoint of the people who experience the problems.

“The Amazon is important to the entire world. One way or another, it’s part of the world’s imagination. As a result, it’s suffered historically from a certain extractivism of images. An imagined Amazon is present in the cinema of fiction, but there’s a political dimension to documentaries, and it’s essential that the people who live in the region themselves produce the vision,” said Gustavo Soranz, a visiting professor at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) and author of Território imaginado – Imagens da Amazônia no cinema (“Imagined Territory – Images of the Amazon on Film”, Edições Muiraquitã, 2012).

Decolonizing imagery

Historically speaking, development of the Amazon has always been thought of in terms of national (rather than regional) economic growth. This hegemonic model is shown by several documentaries. However, the experts who took part in the discussion said it is possible to perceive a change in the way the Indigenous, forest-dwelling and riverine communities are portrayed in documentaries produced over the years.

According to Edna Castro, Emeritus Professor at UFPA and co-director of the documentary Marias da Castanha (“Brazil Nut Marias”), early images of the Amazon conveyed a perception of subordinated people. “Subordination is seen as something fatal, something that doesn’t move but is enshrined as part of social life in the region. The images being produced now show the opposite: the uprisings and insurgencies that permeate the colonial past,” she said.

Ideas relating to progress, prosperity and Eldorado strengthen the current process of commodity production. “I’m referring to the force of the hegemonic image of prosperity, of agriculture, of mining, and of logging,” she said.

“Many documentaries show this invasion of privacy in the Amazon, and they often return to the myth of development and progress. First of all, civilizational actions invaded the region, which was seen as ignorant, bestial, both by public policy, especially under military rule, and by researchers, companies and certain [federal] agencies, such as SUDAM [Superintendency for Development of the Amazon]. But film can help decolonize the imagery,” she said.

Evolution of perception in three films

Soranz agreed with Castro, comparing three films made in different periods to show how perception has evolved in documentaries about extractivism in the Amazon and how the social subjects living in the region have come to be seen as protagonists.

He began with No Paiz das Amazonas (“In the Country of the Amazons”), a silent film directed by Silvino Santos in 1922, when the rubber boom was waning. Showcasing economic models for the region, it can be considered publicity for companies that marketed tobacco, Brazil nuts and fish, among other goods.

“This is the first documentary about the Amazon. It was funded by J.G. Araújo, a trader in forest products. It’s a travelogue,” Soranz said. “A boat travels up the Negro River and shows us the economic potential of nature’s riches. How do social subjects appear? Through the camera’s gaze, in images that denote an affectionate or amicable relationship between the subject who’s filming and the subjects who are filmed. But the story isn’t about them. We have not yet got into life stories. It’s an inventory of the economic possibilities offered by the natural resources that can be extracted from the forest.”

Marias da Castanha (1987), by Edna Castro and Simone Raskin, focuses on Brazil nut processing in Pará. “The interesting point about this film is that we start to hear stories of these women’s lives. We enter a personal universe. They’re portrayed as people who have dreams, desires and struggles,” he said.

The film tells us about the difficulties of travel from the interior to the capital, and what it is like for the women to be heads of household and rear their children alone. “The narratives have this social dimension and encompass the details of the women’s labor in preparing Brazil nuts for the market. This is forest extractivism, but the film doesn’t focus on extractivism. It focuses on these subjects as they go about performing the extraction. It’s typical of Brazilian documentaries in the 1980s to give voice to new social subjects so we can get to know them,” he said.

Lastly, Soranz talked about Antônio e Piti (“Antonio and Piti”, 2019) by Vincent Carelli and Ashaninka Wewito Piyãko, an Indigenous filmmaker. This documentary tells the story of a couple, Antônio – an Ashaninka from a village called Apiwtxa in Acre state, North Brazil – and Piti, a woman who isn’t Indigenous but is the daughter of a “rubber soldier”. The “rubber soldiers” were an army of 55,000 men from Northeast Brazil drafted to harvest rubber in the Amazon for the Allied war effort during World War Two.

“It isn’t only a love story or a film about the prejudices and cultural obstacles faced by a couple,” he said. “It’s an example of a step forward in the telling of life stories. It shows us their private lives and enables us to get to know these people and their struggles.”

Soranz noted that the Ashaninka live in an area where land disputes with illegal settlers are constant. “The film starts with private life and moves out into the political dimension of these disputes, struggles and conflicts over demarcation of Indigenous lands. It’s not just important because of these overarching themes. The documentaries are also very important as a political gesture,” he said.

The series of webinars on “The Amazon in images and movement: the stories of extractivism in the Amazon recorded by the lenses of Brazilian documentary makers” consists of three meetings. The first discussed the changes in extraction activities in the region and how they have been seen by documentary makers.

The second discussed the relevance of using film to disseminate different versions of history that legitimate narratives about the impacts of the giant dams built in the early twenty-first century in the Brazilian Amazon.

The third and last meeting discussed recent films that warn about the consequences of extractivism, especially mining, produced by filmmakers and collectives of Indigenous people who live in the areas involved.

A recording of the first webinar can be watched at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbaACBwT3VM&ab_channel=Ag%C3%AAnciaFAPESP.