Oscar nominated Brazilian docmaker Petra Costa got to grips with US Alex Pritz, director of The Territory, and the rain forest activist and Indigenous leader Bitaté Uru Eu Wau Wau. In the Academy Award short-listed feature doc, when a network of Brazilian farmers seizes a protected area of the Amazon rainforest, Bitaté and his mentor must fight back in defense of the land as well as other Indigenous peoples living deep within the forest.
“For me, it really started with Neidinha (Bandeira),” director Pritz explained from the outset about the activist at the centre of his film. “My interest in these types of stories began earlier. I studied environmental science and philosophy, and so a lot of the questions I’m interested in asking through film are about our relationship with the natural world. So I’d read a lot about the land conflict in the Amazon and came across the work of Neidinha…and just thought like, holy shit, this is the most incredibly powerful, brave woman I’ve ever heard of. And she’s doing this work in a part of the world where almost everybody’s against her. So I just sent her an email, reached out and said, ‘Hi, I love what you’re doing. You know, you’re incredible and it seems like your life could be turned upside down if this new Bolsonaro gets elected.” (Pritz had made contact during the 2018 electoral campaign in Brazil.)
“So the story really began with her, and through her was introduced to Bitaté and the Uru Eu Wau Wau community,” Pritz adds. “And also I was encouraged to try to investigate the perspective of these farmers and settlers who were invading this indigenous territory, who were destroying the land.”
“The farmers and settlers are poor, disenfranchised, marginalized people. And it’s one of the great victories, I think, of a lot of popularist governments around the world that they convince poor, marginalized people that other poor marginalized groups, their neighbours, are their enemies,” Pritz underlined. “When Sergio and Martins [two settlers in the film] talk about how land is not distributed correctly and there’s too much land for too few people, they’re speaking about indigenous groups when really they should be speaking about these mega ranchers who have monoculture beef and soy plantations that have pushed them into this economic position in the first place.”
Click here to watch the whole conversation between Petra Costa, Alex Pritz and Bitaté Uru Eu Wau Wau.
