The Territory Review: An Eye-Opening Look at a Fight Against Deforestation

Alex Pritz’s documentary provides an affecting look at Indigenous lives at the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon.

The Territory
Photo: National Geographic Documentary Films

An opening text scroll in director Alex Pritz’s documentary The Territory recounts that Brazil’s Uru-eu-wau-wau people were first contacted by the country’s government in the 1980s. A bit over three decades later, as we glean from the film’s embedded point of view on their lives, these native Amazonians have adopted some of the accoutrements of modernity. They ride motorcycles, wear soccer jerseys, and use smartphones to follow Brazil’s 2018 general election, the latter of which resulted in an ongoing disaster for their people following the victory of far-right nationalist Jair Bolsonaro.

Twenty-year-old Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau, one of the focal points of The Territory, recognizes the importance of his people’s land not just for them, but for the Earth. “The Amazon is the heart of the world,” he paraphrases a report he read online—because without the rainforest, the global average temperature will rise five degrees Celsius before the end of the century.

Bitaté realizes that his struggle is in many ways the frontline of the war for the future, which Pritz also chillingly illustrates by returning at various points to time-lapse footage that offers a God’s-eye-view down on a verdant patch of the Amazon valley ceding ground to the washed-out greens and browns of farmland and settlement. It’s an emergency that can only comprehended with a look at the map and the territory, a thesis reinforced by the Uru-eu-wau-wau’s later adoption of drones to help surveil the borders of their reservation.

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Despite their adoption of Portuguese and various modern technologies, one crucial difference between the Uru-eu-wau-wau people and mainstream Brazilian society is their respective relation to the land. The Territory distinctly takes on the perspective of the embattled Uru-eu-wau-wau members fighting to save the sliver of land that remains to them (their land rights were officially recognized in 1991). But it also follows individuals from the other side of the ongoing dispute over land in the Amazon valley: the frontier farmers who were the primary shakers in the movement that brought the would-be authoritarian Bolsonaro to power.

These farmers, supported by—or courting the support of—vast farming conglomerates, have long been looking to open up new grazing land by deforesting much of the Amazon valley, including reservations like those set aside for the Uru-eu-wau-wau. In the age of Bolsonaro, gradual incursions into such territory are still de jure illegal but de facto permitted—and the farmers feel their robbing of native land to be justified. As one farmer named Sergio puts it, the Uru-eu-wau-wau “don’t create anything, they’re not doing anything with the land.”

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This rationalization of wholesale theft should ring a bell with anybody familiar with the history of colonialism. Such were the terms originally used to justify the seizure of land from native peoples in the Americas, who according to a perverse Christian/early capitalist logic, weren’t fulfilling their God-given duty to work the land. (Of course, any knowledge of societies like those of the Iroquois, Cahokia, or Incan quickly puts paid to this myth.)

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This lineage of such assertions from the farmers, along with much of the global context of Amazon deforestation, may have been an avenue worth further pursuit. The Territory is firmly rooted in the present moment of Rondônia, the heavily forested Amazon province in western Brazil, between 2018 and 2020. Although it prominently features a Brazilian activist named Neidinha, it emphasizes native action as the key source of resistance, capturing, in a spirit of triumphant resistance underlined by a driving score, the armed patrols that Bitaté and his people began in the wake of the unsolved murder of one of their own.

After this climactic moment in which a nascent active resistance is formed, The Territory, like so many recent social and environmental documentaries, ends in a more ambivalent place, with a series of postscripts that update us on how things have developed since shooting stopped. Incursions have increased over the course of the pandemic, it seems. These common-enough tropes of documentary narrative—the inspiring climax followed by the epilogue with a dire warning—are clearly meant to create hope without encouraging complacency, but they’re so familiar at this point that when they pop up here, utter despair becomes hard to repress.

Given the film’s 84-minute runtime, Pritz had room broaden the scope of our perspective on the roots of the Uru-eu-wau-wau people’s struggle beyond Bolsonaro and his followers. Their resistance deserves all the support it can get, but in all likelihood it will be insufficient. The destruction of the Amazon is motivated not just by the demagoguery of national politicians and the local, individualist greed of petty farmers, but also an interconnected, U.S.-dominated global market with a history of predatory lending to South American countries.

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We’re all implicated not only in the potential results of that destruction—a broiling planet devoid of ethnic and biological diversity—but also in the roots of the conflict that’s endangering the lives and livelihood of the Uru-eu-wau-wau and other Indigenous people. The Territory provides an eye-opening, affecting look at this frontline, but it may leave you wishing that Pritz had zoomed out on its map just a little bit further to pinpoint the location of the film’s likely audience in relation to the unfolding disaster in the Amazon.

Score: 
 Director: Alex Pritz  Distributor: National Geographic Documentary Films  Running Time: 83 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2022

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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