In Yanuni, the Tribeca closer from Austrian director Richard Ladkani, ecocide and genocide are one and the same. From the vantage point of the occupied, the Ecocidal project is decidedly one of ethnic cleansing—it is only through the forceful killing and erasure of Indigenous peoples defending their homeland that the occupier could fully realize their cruel dream.
A co-production between five countries, the documentary tells the struggle of the Indigenous populace of the Brazilian Amazon collectively fighting for climate and social justice. Leading us through the story is Juma Xipaia, who is also credited as the movie’s co-producer, alongside Richard and Anita Ladkani, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Davisson, and Phillip Watson. Xipaia, who in 2016 became the first female chief in the middle stretches of the Xingu River, a significant tributary of the Amazon, the world’s largest and most-varied tropical rainforest, began protecting her people’s ancestral domain against steadily accelerating violence and depopulation at a young age of 13. The activist affirmed this resolve in a 2009 news broadcast, when an Amazon correspondent asked about her hopes for the future. “Fighting for the indigenous cause. Standing up for my people, who mean everything to me in this life,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I live for them and die for them. My life is going to be one of struggle.”
Throughout this fight for liberation, Xipaia has survived death threats and six assassination attempts. Unidentified men track her activities just as her people endure the environmental exploitation of multinational corporations and the violent presence of illegal, heavily armed miners and loggers on the Xipaya territory—a situation that is heightened by the genocidal policies of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. In 2021, for instance, the Bolsonaro regime sought to fast-track Bill 490/2007, a legislation aimed at stripping Indigenous communities of their ancestral rights, a legislation that is essentially a proxy for the Ecocidal project. The Indigenous population protested the measure outside the National Congress Palace in the Brazilian capital, where Xipaia witnessed one of her people shot by riot police. A year later, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won his third presidency in an election rife with hostility and polarization, Xipaia returned to that same building where the fatal attack took place as she assumed public office as Secretary of Articulation and Promotion of Indigenous Rights from the newly created Ministry of Indigenous Peoples; other Indigenous women were also appointed to da Silva’s government.
The inception of the ministry is a watershed moment for Brazil’s Indigenous movement and its representation at the highest levels of government, especially in a country that remains politically divided. Yanuni, titled after a little black bird featuring a red beak, unravels the history that led to this achievement and what unfolds after the fact, all the while interrogating the tension in Xipaia’s new role in the government, in the very system she once resisted. Often wearing tribal face paint and a feathered headdress, Xipaia intermittently narrates the movie in voiceover. And there’s something particularly poetic in Ladkani’s visual lexicon, chiefly resorting to drone and overhead shots to depict the beauty of the Amazonian terrain and the billions of life forms that it houses. Magnified by the hypnotic and immersive soundscape, the camera moves through the foliage, as though it exists among the flora and fauna.
At the same time, the director trains the camera on the environmental plunder that Amazon has endured—rivers drying up and turning into mud due to illegal mining operations, trees being burned, and waters poisoned with mercury—and of course the genocide and forced expulsion of the Indigenous populace (children suffer from malnutrition due to the contaminated water they are forced to drink, while women are raped). Ladkani layers it with archival footage, local and international news clips, and conversations between Indigenous folks. Shot over five years, the result is a striking picture that is indicative not only of today’s climate crisis but also of the social injustices committed in and beyond Brazil. In fact, the documentary instantly brings to mind the state-sanctioned attacks and intimidation suffered by Indigenous communities in the Philippines, which remains among Asia’s most dangerous countries for environmental defenders, as well as the consequences of large-scale mining and hydroelectric projects in the country’s biodiversity hotspots and ancestral domains.
While there’s a broader politics that informs the documentary, much of it is also spent depicting the intimate relationship between Xipaia and her toddler son, Tuppak, who are both forced to live in a safe house away from their village, from their people.
The mother feels so out of a place in a foreign city, while the son longs for the liberty their home village offers, the liberty to climb trees or play with fellow Indigenous kids. Their existence is inextricably linked to the forest. “It’s like your spirit has no peace of mind. You feel a lot of spiritual fatigue. That’s the hardest part,” the mother says of forging a life outside the world she knew. Past this, there’s also the romance between Xipaia and her new husband, Hugo Loss, who in the film’s thrilling second half is tasked to combat unauthorized mining operations throughout the Amazon as part of IBAMA, a federal arm of Brazil’s environmental ministry. Often seen helicoptering into the vast terrain, Loss and his lean crew destroy and burn all sorts of machinery, which is juxtaposed against the burden engendered by Xipaia’s state job and her position as a beacon of progress for a disenfranchised population, while coming to terms with another pregnancy. Her enduring care for her homeland, then, is an extension of her maternal instinct to protect her children from harm.
By portraying how environmental well-being and human struggle are extremely interlinked, Yanuni argues that climate justice is not possible without social justice. Any fight for the environment, for it to be effective and truly liberating, must first be a fight for the people that have long defended and breathed with it. The forest, contrary to popular thinking, is not only a place of beauty but also of struggle and resistance.
Yanuni recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Tribeca site for the title.
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