Children of the Amazon Collects High Honors in Nepal

Posted in Children of the Amazon,Deforestation,Film,Indigenous Peoples,Nepal by Denise Zmekhol on May 13th, 2011


Children of the Amazon recently picked up the Bronze Drum Award at the Nepal International Indigenous Film Festival. Denise Zmekhol  posted on ITVS Beyond the Box a report from her trip, reproduced below, along with some special footage from the film. Children of the Amazon will be rebroadcast on May 14 and 15 on the PBS WORLD Channel.

In April I was invited to participate in the Nepal International Indigenous Film Festival. I returned feeling very inspired by the 10 days I spent in Kathmandu. I met many indigenous filmmakers from Nepal and around the world. Although one nation politically, Nepal — the birthplace of Buddha — is truly a multiethnic, multilingual, and multifaith country.

It was an amazing experience to share Children of the Amazon with the Nepali audience, many of whom knew very little about the Amazon even though deforestation is a major issue in Nepal.

I was invited to do a personal presentation on the theme of the “Evolving Indigenous Woman” in conjunction with the film festival. I shared my perspective on what happens when development does not respect the environment, the individual or community rights. I also described the impact of this development both positive and negative on women and young girls.

I created a special clip with excerpts from Children of the Amazon to show the interaction among women as they discuss issues of rainforest logging and education; and how they relate to living in two worlds — the one before contact with outsiders (only 40 years ago) and the other, the result of that contact.

Most indigenous women I met during the making of my film viewed education as the means of coping with a non-indigenous world. The example I used in the clip was clear-cutting of the rain forest. Conflict is inevitable; how to survive without letting themselves being exploited by the economic power that continues to destroy their resources — including as Motira Surui says, even the fruit trees that the indigenous people use for food.

Denise Zmekhol receiving the Bronze Drum award

Denise Zmekhol receiving the Bronze Drum award

One scene that I used in the clip shows a symbolic clash between generations, one that seems universal in any culture. We see the elder Weiã telling her daughter how she would like to see her daughter wearing the same face tattoos that the Surui people have used for thousand of years. The daughter simply responds that she doesn’t want the tattoos.

After the screening people told me they were inspired by the way the film represented the span of time between the original photographs then and the young people shown now. The film festival honored Children of the Amazon with the Bronze Drum Award.

I also met with the Directors Guild of Nepal. Their struggle mirrors our own in terms of the need for funding. Their situation is even more difficult with no government support for filmmaking. What private support exists often seeks purely commercial projects. However the Nepali films I’ve seen capture the beauty of Nepal that I saw firsthand, and also reveal a country of economic struggle and armed Maoist revolution.

Nepal was a highlight in the presentation of my film around the world. I experienced once again the sensation that we are all connected through our shared fate of the planet and in that sense all of us are children of the Amazon.

The eyes of Buddha, who was born in Nepal, at Swayambhunath, also known as the Monkey Temple - Kathmandu, Nepal

The eyes of Buddha, who was born in Nepal, at Swayambhunath, also known as the Monkey Temple - Kathmandu, Nepal

Time off from the festival, a chance to explore Kathmandu's side streets

Time off from the festival, a chance to explore Kathmandu's side streets

A gazing holy man captured in passing during a break from the film festival in Kathmandu

A gazing holy man captured in passing during a break from the film festival in Kathmandu

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Article about Chief Almir in Der Spiegel

Posted in Amazon,Chief Almir Surui,Children of the Amazon,Deforestation,Indigenous Peoples,Surui by Kevin Kanarek on June 12th, 2010

speigel-online-chief-almir-surui

This week, the international edition of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran an in-depth profile of Chief Almir and the story of the Surui tribe.  It includes a detailed description of the Surui Carbon Project and 50-year plan, and some recent events regarding the monitoring and protection of the forest.  Just last week, the Surui intercepted three trucks from the neighboring state of Mato Grosso as they were about to drive off with illegally harvested mahogany.

An interesting sidenote: the Surui have invented a word for Google in their language: “ragogmakan,” meaning “the messenger.”

And a touching view of a generation gap that spans two worlds: Almir’s interactions with his 87-year old father, Marimop.

Read the article
Download the PDF file

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Forest Time

Posted in Children of the Amazon,Forest Time,Indigenous Peoples by Denise Zmekhol on February 4th, 2010

This clip from “Children of the Amazon” is about Forest Time – tempo de floresta in Portuguese – the time before the settlers came to the Amazon.

Below it is an excerpt from my interview with Bruce Gellerman of Living on Earth

GELLERMAN: This is the sound of the Amazon rainforest. It’s one of the richest places on the planet for plants and wildlife and home to scores of remote indigenous tribes. The forest is also one of the most important places in the world for regulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

[CHAIN SAWS AND TREE FALLS]

GELLERMAN: This too is the sound of the Amazon. Chainsaws and bulldozers have been carving away at the rainforest for decades clearing land for highways, cattle ranches and soybean plantations. It’s estimated that nearly 20 percent of the Amazon has been cleared, including an area almost the size of New Hampshire just last year.

Much of the destruction of the Amazon forest has taken place on the territory of indigenous tribes. In just a few brief years, members of many of these isolated societies were wrenched from the stone age into the space age… some driven nearly to extinction by their first contact with the outside world.

Almost 20 years ago, Denise Zmekhol traveled deep into the Amazon to photograph and document their struggles. She recently returned with a film crew to examine the changes the people of the rainforest have gone through since her first visit. Her new film is called “Children of the Amazon.”

It focuses on one tribe in particular: the Surui. Denise Zmekhol says the Surui never had contact with the outside world until the roads we built.

ZMEKHOL: The first official contact happened in 1969 when they were still living in what I call in the film “forest time.” It’s a very recent contact and I think they had to learn a lot about our society and our world in such a small time. So for thousands of years they were living in one way and just 39 years ago everything changed for them.

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The Story of “Children of the Amazon”

Posted in Amazon,Chico Mendes,Chief Almir Surui,Children of the Amazon,Deforestation,Film,Indigenous Peoples,Rubber Tappers,Surui by Denise Zmekhol on January 1st, 2010

I traveled to the Brazilian Amazon on several occasions between 1987-1990 to assist on television documentaries. During my journeys, I had the opportunity to visit many Indigenous communities, always with my camera by my side. What caught my eye were the children. Born to parents who had relied on the rainforest for their survival, these children were growing up surrounded by new ways—ways that were destroying the forest.

I was also drawn to the children of the rubber tappers…the people who harvest the wild rubber trees. The trees they relied on were also being cut down. I photographed the legendary rubber tapper Chico Mendes and his family. Chico had become renowned the world over for his nonviolent resistance movement to protect the rainforest.

15 years later—and a world away—I returned to these slides, which were never printed, never shared.  The images brought back a particularly searing memory: a phone call from Chico in December 1988, asking me to film his funeral. I told him he was crazy, he wasn’t going to die, he had too much work to do. Two weeks later he was shot dead by a rancher. Stirred by faces of the children in my photographs and haunted by Chico’s untimely death, I was inspired to travel to the Amazon again—this time, to make a movie.

While I expected change, I was not prepared for the extent of it. So much of the forest had been destroyed. My response to the loss is the creation of Children of the Amazon — a tribute to a people struggling to save their forest home. But the goal of the film is more than to bear witness. I hope to offer insight to a distant and remote land while simultaneously drawing connections to our own lives. For we are—all of us— Children of the Amazon breathing the same air, walking the same planet, and in some sense that we have yet to understand, sharing the same fate.

~ Denise Zmekhol

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