Brazil

Journey with Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in search of the indigenous children she photographed fifteen years ago. Children of the Amazon invites you to see through the eyes of these inspiring, remarkably resilient people whose lives are transformed by a road carved through their forest home by an outside world. From Chief Amir Surui’s embattled efforts to stop illegal loggers to the assassination of legendary rubber tapper Chico Mendes, this poetic and visually stunning film engages our senses and sympathies as global issues take on a profound human perspective.

Also in 2008 Zmekhol produced and directed the short documentary Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops with Google Earth Outreach as Google trained Indigenous Amazonian tribes to use Google Earth. The film documents the partnership between Google and the indigenous tribes to create maps that record cultural traditions and monitor the forest to prevent illegal logging.

The field of anthropology goes under the magnifying glass in this fiery investigation of the seminal research on Yanomamö Indians. In the 1960s and ’70s, a steady stream of anthropologists filed into the Amazon Basin to observe this “virgin” society untouched by modern life. Thirty years later, the events surrounding this infiltration have become a scandalous tale of academic ethics and infighting. The origins of violence and war and the accuracy of data gathering are hotly debated among the scholarly clan. Soon these disputes take on Heart of Darkness overtones as they descend into shadowy allegations of sexual and medical violation. Director José Padilha brilliantly employs two provocative strategies to raise unsettling questions about the boundaries of cultural encounters. He allows professors accused of heinous activities to defend themselves, and the Yanomami to represent their side of the story. As this riveting excavation deconstructs anthropology’s colonial legacy, it challenges our society’s myths of objectivity and the very notion of “the other.”