Alex Pritz’s documentary “The Territory” drops us right onto the front lines of the battle to preserve the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Pritz embeds us with both an Indigenous community under threat, the Uru Eu Wau Wau, and the farmers who seize Indigenous lands with apparent impunity. That on-the-ground approach brings a visceral suspense to global environmental issues and gives a firsthand view of a local community (numbering less than 200) as they fight for survival in new ways.
“This was an active conflict — almost a long, slow war,” Pritz, who has filmed in Somalia and Sudan, said last week. Heroes emerge — such as Bitaté Uru Eu Wau Wau, a young media-savvy Indigenous leader, and Neidinha Bandeira, a nervy veteran activist — but the threat of violence proves all too real. I spoke with Pritz (who started the production in 2018) about navigating multiple perspectives and visualizing the vast deforestation. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you build trust with the Uru Eu Wau Wau community?
The key to any documentary is all the relationships that happen off camera. I think the elders especially were skeptical of outsiders. They had total media fatigue. “What the hell are all these journalists doing taking up all our time coming here, and we’re not seeing anything change?” I wanted to demonstrate what the film would look like, would feel like, and what it could be capable of. That was a slow process, partially because the elders had never seen a feature film before. That’s where Bitaté and this younger cohort in the community came in, to help explain.
A big part was bringing some small cameras with me, having people interview me and trying to demonstrate what being part of a documentary entails: I’m all up in your business eight hours a day. We also showed them Brazilian films — [including] “Bacurau,” — and we talked about representation in the media.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, how did the Uru Eu Wau Wau help shoot the film?
In August 2020, I brought a bunch of other camera kits and audio equipment, sanitized them and left them at the edge of the villages. People would pick up the cameras, and we would communicate over WhatsApp about any technical problems. The scene that I think makes the whole film was shot by Tangãi Uru Eu Wau Wau, my co-cinematographer: their arrest of an invader. I have shot a lot of surveillance missions myself, and when we saw the footage coming from Tangãi, it was so clear from the first frame that his was just plain better. You felt the chaos and tension in a way that I just wasn’t capturing. The other side of it, too, is that by working with the Uru Eu Wau Wau as co-producers, they’re receiving an equal portion of direct profits of the film.
There’s a long tradition of participatory filmmaking across the Amazon. I was really inspired by Vincent Carelli and Video nas Aldeias [Video in the Villages], and there’s an incredible network of Indigenous media creators in Brazil.
How did you bring in the perspective of the farmers?
The impetus to reach out to them came from Neidinha and Bitaté. [They felt] if we want to show what we’re up against in a real way, go talk to the people that are committing these acts of violence and this destruction. The [farmers] association of Rio Bonito felt like they had some degree of impunity because their guy was in office at that point. Bolsonaro talked about “iPhone Indigenous people.” He and a lot of these settlers tried to delegitimize Indigenous people that are engaging with technology.
The farmers were skeptical and distrustful [of us], but I think they admire America, and the American West in particular. Especially beginning this [film] in 2018 under Trump’s America, they felt this mutual respect between Brazil and the United States as these two colonial countries. And they see themselves as the heroes of this story.
Our basic social contract was, “You’re going to speak for yourself, and there will be competing points of view presented alongside yours.” I didn’t say we were speaking to Bitaté Uru Eu Wau Wau the next week! We had to have really clear boundaries of information, because I could never be put in a position where I had to give up sensitive information. That would be both morally and ethically bad, but also dangerous. There was always the sense that you’re being watched. I would get photos of me sent from numbers I didn’t know.
Did you ever feel your life was in danger?
I was always more worried for the members of our team that are in Brazil, day in, day out. But we were totally aware of the risks. And they’re definitely there. The rule of law does not extend to a lot of these parts of the Amazon. There were moments when we felt like, “We need to get out of town right now.” You know, this interview didn’t go well, it’s in these small towns with 150 people and one hotel that’s not really a hotel, it’s somebody’s house, and everybody knows you’re there. And then I would be followed out of town or something.
The movie also zooms out with dramatic satellite photos of deforestation. How did those come together?
Massive amounts of land are being chewed up, and the only firewalls against it are these Indigenous territories, which you can see so clearly in these time-lapses. Anything that is private property turns to brown. I built this whole sequence originally going on Google Earth Pro: Take a screenshot, bump up a year, take a new screenshot, bump up a year. Luckily, our executive producer was this amazing 25-year-old activist, Txai Suruí, and her father, Almir Suruí, had, in a prior decade, gone to Google and said, “We need better images of the Amazon!” Through that relationship, we were able to ask Google Earth to let us use these images. But it was just a cool full circle to realize that the only reason we have these images is because of another visionary Indigenous leader who had already thought of this.
