Our Children's River

The Return

June 2021 •English

It’s spring in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Uyantza festival is underway with the community celebrating all that the forest has to offer. Meanwhile, news is breaking around the world that a novel virus is spreading and a state of emergency is declared across the country. As people test positive for COVID-19 in the community, some families decide to leave and head deeper into the jungle. Disconnected from school, friends, the internet, and work, one family learns to reconnect with life in the forest. The children begin to unlearn the national curriculum, and instead are taught Indigenous knowledge that mainstream schools normally pass over. As COVID-19 wreaks havoc around the planet, the family reconnect to their ancestral ways, but as news arrives that Ecuador’s lockdown will end soon, will the family choose to return?

Ikátena

January 1983 •Portuguese

Povo da Floresta

January 2024 •Portuguese

Amazon

January 1997 •English

Explore the mysterious Amazon through the amazing IMAX experience. Amazon celebrates the beauty, vitality and wonder of the rapidly disappearing rain forest.

The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms

January 2010 •English

Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.

Le Mystère des rivières volantes d'Amazonie

November 2022 •French

Discovered about twenty years ago, the immense masses of water vapor that fly over the Amazon, called "flying rivers", fascinate researchers. Their future could be intimately linked to climate change.

Itapoa - Un proyecto que camina

Invalid date •Spanish

Nostalgia for the Lake

April 2023 •Spanish

A vision from Limbo, where the canoeist of the eternal lake floats in his boat, between sleep and wakefulness. When he sleeps, he dreams of the everyday of a parallel time. when he wakes up, the same song haunts him again and again. his boat, “ara” (time, in guarani) travels through time like a shooting star.

The Invention of the Other

November 2022 •Portuguese

In 2019, the Brazilian government coordinates the largest and riskiest expedition of the last decades into the Amazon rainforest to search for a group of isolated indigenous people in vulnerability and promote their first contact with non-indigenous. Bruno Pereira, who would later be murdered in the same region and turned into an international symbol in favor of the indigenous and the forest, leads the expedition.

Ajishama, The White Ibis

January 2003 •Spanish

Shot in Venezuela over a 30-year period, this documentary depicts the life and work of José Maria Korta, the controversial Jesuit Missionary with the Ye'kwana people of the Amazon.

Searching for Cannibal Holocaust

October 2021 •English

Italian horror fan and academic Calum Waddell speaks with some of the original makers of the controversial horror classic "Cannibal Holocaust" before venturing into the Amazon jungle and surrounding city port, Leticia, to uncover some of the local stories behind the making of the motion picture. What is uncovered, however, leads to a wider and unexpected "true crime" story.

AMAZORIOCA

Invalid date •Portuguese

A journey through the Brazilian Amazon, guided by the eyes of Renato, a Carioca turned Amazorioca. A reflection on identity, the legacy of an ancestral territory, and the cost of progress. An ode to the forest and the fragility of what remains.

Ex-Shaman

February 2018 •Portuguese

Ever since their first contact with the Western world in 1969 the Paiter Suruí, an indigenous people living in the Amazon basin, have been exposed to sweeping social changes. Smartphones, gas, electricity, medicines, weapons and social media have now replaced their traditional way of life. Illness is a risk for a community increasingly unable to isolate itself from the modernization brought by white people or the power of the church. Ethnocide threatens to destroy their soul. With dogged persistence, Perpera, a former shaman, is searching for a way to restore the old vitality to his village.

Edna: Memoirs from the Future

October 2024 •Portuguese

Brazilian documentary short about the life of Edna — actress of Iracema.

Mass-market retailing: The end of a system?

September 2021 •French

The supermarket chains used to seem unbeatable, capturing the lion’s share of the grocery market. But for some years now they have been in crisis. In the wake of a fierce price war, retailers are resorting to increasingly aggressive commercial negotiation methods at the expense of suppliers, farmers and producers. Further competition is coming from the tech giants as Amazon and Alibaba invest in the food industry. What are the implications of all these changes on working conditions, the quality of our food and the future of our planet?

Heaven Earth

September 2008 •English

This documentary examines ayahuasca shamanism near Iquitos (a metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon), and the tourism it has attracted. The filmmakers talk with two ayahuasqueros, Percy Garcia and Ron Wheelock, as well as ayuahuasca tourists and local people connected with the ayahuasca industry.

Spears from All Sides

June 2019 •Spanish

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 tribes are estranged as some want to benefit from the short-term money the company is offering while others fight to preserve their land, culture and independence under all circumstances.

Piripkura

March 2018 •Portuguese

The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.

Holding Up the Sky

April 2023 •French

"When the shamans stop dancing and life in the rainforest loses its balance, the sky will collapse and come to crush everything." This wisdom is passed down from generation to generation by the Yanomami of Brazil. But gold miners are polluting the rivers, shamans are dying, the rainforest is disappearing and the earth is getting hotter. Davi Kopenawa, a tribal leader and spokesman for the Yanomami, has been fighting relentlessly against the colonization of his land for 40 years. He warns Westerners that when the sky collapses, they too will be crushed. Why don't they listen? Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

The Mirror of the Spirit

September 2014 •English

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.