The Amazon plays a vital part in regulating the planet's temperature. Yet, last year, forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon soared by 85 per cent. Illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture are decimating the land. With huge profits to be made, the Amazon is a dangerous place to ask...
In Dark Green we follow conservationist and storyteller Paul Rosolie deep into the jungle of the Amazon, risking his life to learn more on this last remaining wilderness on earth.
A Shipibo boy is raised by his grandparents in direct contact with the Amazon forest and its inhabitants, whom he respects and considered part of their social environment. Growing up and coming into contact with urban life, the child denies his culture to avoid the discrimination, but, in the end,...
The Shipibo-Konibo people of Peruvian Amazon decorate their pottery, jewelry, textiles, and body art with complex geometric patterns called kené. These patterns also have corresponding songs, called icaros, which are integral to the Shipibo way of life. This documentary explores these unique art...
Don Emilio is a humble, 63-year-old man who lives in the Amazon rainforest, seven miles from the city of Iquitos, Peru. For all of his adult life he has worked as a curandero and vegetalista, a traditional healer. He estimates that in his career he has treated more than 2,500 clients. Through the...
The Marquis de Wavrin, a Belgian explorer, spends four years in the Amazon jungle in Ecuador looking for a lost friend who may have fallen victim to headhunters.
Steeped in the long oral tradition of Waorani storytelling, Gange Yeti shares her own coming-of-age story as a young Waorani woman living deep within the Amazon rainforest. Following Gange and her community for over 11 years, the film captures her transition from a quiet teenager into a confident...
The imagination of history in Ecuador never thought that oil, “its redeeming hope”, discovered in the Lago Agrio No. 1 well, was going to mean the beginning of the worst environmental catastrophe on the planet. Thirty years of operation and exploitation of the Texaco company, forever...
In May 2003, around 30 women and children were murdered in the Ecuadorian jungle. The victims belonged to the Taromenani clan, an uncontacted indigenous group in Ecuador. The massacre was left in impunity and oblivion. This documentary explores the history of contact with the Huaorani decades ago,...
The history of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, an opera house located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, whose construction, between 1884 and 1896, depended on the labor exploitation of the local indigenous populations, provides an insight into the cultural, social and political situation in...
Herlinda Augustin is a Shipibo healer who lives with her family in Peruvian Amazonia. Will she and other healers be able to maintain their ancient tradition despite Western encroachment?
Anthropologist and filmmaker João Meirinhos travels in Peruvian Amazonia to speak with healers who work with the plant medicine ayahuasca. The journey begins on the outskirts of Puerto Maldonado in southeastern Peru, and winds northward to Pucallpa and Iquitos.
Until the 1950s, the Waorani were able to successfully defended their area of settlement – today’s Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon – with the aid of spears. Then Christian missionaries entered the thick rain forest and paved the way for an oil company. Nowadays many of the...
Shipibo healer Ricardo Amaringo describes how he prepares, teaches, and shares the plant medicine ayahuasca. Olivia and Julian Arévalo sing examples of icaros (healing songs) in the Shipibo language.
A series of suicides among youths who had to travel far from home to go to school, shocked their indigenous community in the Colombian Amazon. They are different cultures in the frantic friction of our time, it is a generation of young people born from the meeting of both cultures who are hanging...
