'The Territory' Review: Indigenous People Fight Encroaching Deforestation In An Engrossing Doc Portrait

“I consider this land mine,” a Brazilian man, identified by onscreen text as a “settler,” informs the camera at one point during “The Territory.” The land in question is a section of the Amazon rainforest in the state of Rondônia, encircled by modern development, which is, in fact, the homeland and protected territory of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous people. Whether or not such legally recognized sovereignty is, in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, any match for white vibes is the subject of director Alex Pritz’s first feature, which won an Audience Award and a Jury prize at this January’s Sundance and is an issue-driven documentary gratifyingly interested in action as much as advocacy.

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Under Bolsonaro, a cancer on the lungs of the planet, self-fashioned Brazilian settlers are increasingly empowered to encroach on ostensibly protected regions of the Amazon, hacking and burning the jungle away to make new farming and cattle grazing lands, displacing and effectively ethnically cleansing Indigenous peoples and accelerating climate change. This mutually reinforcing neocolonial cycle of racism and greed is “The Territory” ’s backdrop. The film begins prior to Bolsonaro’s election by introducing us to Bitaté, a teenager and rising Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leader and activist Neidinha Bandeira. Early in “The Territory,” Neidinha brings a drone into the Amazon. The film’s stakes are literally revealed as the camera’s perspective shifts, traveling up from the floor of the rainforest, where the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau harvest tubers and fish with nets and spears, into the air, where it pans across the canopy to the muddy, cleared new pastures shockingly nearby.

“The Territory” depicts an existential struggle. One of Pritz’s secondary subjects was murdered by invaders on Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land, and the crew is present for a harrowing threat to Neidinha’s family (a regular occurrence, we’re led to believe). But the filmmakers have access to all sides of the conflict, also spending time with the settlers. There’s no danger of false equivalence: The music, including both a folk-song refrain about deforestation and the score by Katya Mihailova, lyrical during a ceremony elevating Bitaté to a position of leadership, and ominous for a sequence depicting the burning of the Amazon rainforest, is, if anything, overemphatic. Still, the time Pritz spends with various factions of settlers—including filming them on illegal incursions into the jungle in trucks or on scooters as they sharpen their chainsaws and hack away at nature—helps contextualize the issue more globally.

Sergio, a farmhand, speaks about “the Brazilian dream” of owning one’s own land and working it; he’s the president of the Rio Bonito Association, which seeks government recognition for their claim to some of the territory. The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, Sergio says, “don’t farm or create anything,” and he sees the protected status of their land as a big-government handout, bypassing bootstrapping little guys like him. (Neidinha, at one point, tells a journalist that such settlers are often clandestinely funded by larger business interests, though viewers curious about how Astroturfing works in Brazil will have to chase down details online after the movie ends.) Sergio’s political vocabulary is hardly the film’s only echo of the American pioneer spirit and far from the most egregious. Martins, a settler who won’t slow down his bushwhacking to move at the Association’s pace, simply tells the filmmakers: “This is how Brazil was created,” chainsaw in hand, a model of self-sufficiency.

Pritz spent three years filming, and though COVID complicated its production, “The Territory” is well-exposited—you’re rarely conscious of editing-room saves or post-hoc interviews covering gaps in the shooting. The film’s crux comes relatively late on, as the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau escalate their self-defense. In assemblies, elders openly debate the need for, or uselessness of, violent resistance, particularly in the face of a disempowered Indigenous Affairs bureaucracy that repeatedly, almost proudly, avows its own uselessness. Needing to gather their own evidence of lawbreaking, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau patrol their territory, armed not just with spears and arrows but also with drones, walkie-talkies, phones, and GPS. “The Territory” provides an intriguing, fairly granular look at how NGO money and local organization can fund and execute specific campaigns to exert leverage on public policy: The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, we see in one tv-news montage, made dozens of arrests of invaders bringing gasoline and chainsaws into the territory, and attracted news coverage in multiple languages. Much of the footage of this portion of “The Territory” was shot by the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau on their patrols and around their villages, with the cameras they were able to obtain for their efforts.

This is “empowerment,” and not just in the vague documentary-lab sense of letting communities “tell their own stories.” Under pressure from the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau resistance—which also included burning down illegally erected settler shacks—the Rio Bonito Association falls apart. In one of the film’s final images, Bitaté teaches a child how to use a digital camera—a new kind of handed-down ancestral knowledge, an elder training the next generation in preparation for a lifelong struggle, which is what awaits, per end-title cards explaining that the Amazon rainforest continues to shrink at accelerating rates.

Here, then, are the limits of the activism the film depicts; the imposing structural obstacles faced by the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau raise a related question about the boundaries of the film itself. Does “The Territory” do enough to involve or indict an American audience? To connect the struggle it depicts, not just to consumer choices like excessive red meat consumption, but also to the ethical compromises of “pro-growth” liberal politics, and even to our prosperity itself, built on extractive and immoral practices in the past and present, which is the basis for Brazilian settlers’ grievance and the yardstick of their aspiration?

Pritz and his editors, in fairness, pick out some fairly damning parallels to our own history of land grabs and exploitation and to our contemporary culture wars: in Sergio and Martins’s choices of words; in the American-style evangelical Christianity favored by the Brazilian apostles of Manifest Destiny; even in the frequent cutaways to cattle, which hearkens back to the conquest of the American West, the wealth it built and the iconography that celebrated it. All of which makes it difficult for well-intentioned American viewers of “The Territory” to walk away from the film feeling merely vaguely sad at the backwardness and problems of development in the Southern Hemisphere. But then again, these audiences will see “The Territory” when it opens at venues like New York’s wonderful nonprofit Film Forum, the website of which offers its thanks for a donation of between $50,000 and $149,999 from the co-head of the Global Industrials Group in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs. [B+]