🗓 Friday 4 December | Doors 17:30 | Screening 18:30
📍 SOAS University of London, room SALT (Senate House), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
⏱ Running time: approx. 97 min, plus discussion | All ages | English subtitles
The climate catastrophe is not coming. For the people in these films, it is already here, and they didn’t cause it.
In Brazil, most greenhouse gas emissions don’t come from cars or factories. They come from cutting down forests and from agribusiness. Forests are cleared for cattle and soy, much of it exported to markets like ours. Meanwhile the Amazon has lived through record droughts: in 2023 and 2024, rivers that communities depend on for water, food and transport fell to their lowest levels on record. In the Cerrado, Brazil’s vast savanna and the source of many of its rivers, clearance has been advancing even faster than in the Amazon.
Indigenous territories are among the best-preserved areas left in Brazil. The people who live in them are holding the line for the rest of us, and they pay for it. Brazil is consistently one of the deadliest countries in the world for land and environmental defenders. Those who protect the forest are threatened, criminalised and killed, while those who destroy it are rarely held to account.
These films show the people who have been defending it all along: Indigenous women organising between the Cerrado and the Amazon, the Xavante surrounded by pasture where their sacred forest once stood, riverside communities facing drought on the Jauaperi, families criminalised for living off the land, and a young Indigenous woman from Belém’s periphery fighting for her place in a country that still makes her to choose between her ancestry and her education.
Quem Quer? (Who Wants It?)
Dir. Célia Maracajá | Brazil | 2025 | Essay film | 13 min
Dandara is Indigenous, born and raised on the outskirts of the city, far from her people’s land. She must choose between claiming her ancestry and a place at a public university, in a country that still makes her choose.
Capim (Grass)
Dir. Julia Munhoz & Caio Pimenta | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 17 min
In the 1960s, the Xavante of Marãiwatsédé were flown off their land to make way for a cattle ranch. Decades later, they won it back and found pasture where their sacred forest once stood. To avoid going hungry, they now raise the cattle of the people who drove them out.
Minhocuçu
Dir. Leonardo Branco & Lucas Campos | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 18 min
For over a century, harvesting the giant minhocuçu earthworm has fed dozens of families in Minas Gerais. Yet they are the ones treated as criminals. The film turns the question around: who really threatens this land?
Thutalinãnsu
Dir. Helena Corezomaé | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 19 min
Between the Cerrado and the Amazon, sixty Terena, Paresi, Manoki and Nambikwara women have built their own organisation. With it they fight for food sovereignty, their culture and their land in the face of a climate emergency that others created.
A Última Reserva (The Last Reserve)
Dir. Patrick Granja | Brazil | 2024 | Documentary | 30 min
Deep in the Amazon, riverside communities on the Jauaperi River face drought, climate change and predatory fishing. They are fighting off invasions of their newly won reserve with whatever they have.
