Austrian director and cinematographer Richard Ladkani knew little about the Amazon Rainforest before he decided to make a film about it. It was 2019. Fires raged across the Amazon. Ladkani had just finished his film Sea of Shadows, about the desperate effort to rescue the critically endangered vaquita porpoise in the Sea of Cortés and the drug cartels and traffickers threatening its habitat. He was inhaling news about the fires, which got him thinking: “Is there a movie out there that really explains to people, emotionally, that this is our Amazon? That we’re losing not a remote place far away in Brazil or South America, but that this actually relates to us, wherever you live on the planet?” Ladkani soon found that the impact-driven film he envisioned did not exist. And so, the first seeds of Yanuni were sown. Filmed across two worlds, the Brazilian capital Brasília and a remote village in the Xipaya Indigenous Territory, the documentary film focuses on Juma Xipaia, an Indigenous chief from the Brazilian Amazon. It centers her ongoing effort to confront illegal gold miners, land grabbers and multinational corporations threatening the Amazon’s forests, alongside her husband, Hugo Loss, the head of special operations at Brazil’s environmental protection agency, IBAMA, who leads dangerous operations to crack down on illegal mining deep in the rainforest. The film captures the personal realities environmental defenders face in the Amazon and features rare video of an IBAMA mission to combat illegal miners. Juma Xipaia is central to the movie…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.