The executive-produced Leonardo DiCaprio Eco doc, “We Are Guardians,” sets the inevitable challenge of providing a small—but vastly comprehensive—window into one of the greatest environmental crises in the history of our planet: the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. It’s a topic so vast that even a sprawling miniseries would struggle to contain it, and yet directors Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman manage to wrap their arms around the disaster in just over 80 minutes; not simplifying the situation, but contrasting the apocalyptic clarity of the problem with the infinite complexity of solving it.
The facts speak for themselves, tragically, because they are not always heard. One of several people in the film who help anchor the project as a quick fix for activism rather than a searing work of art, climate scientist Luciana Gatti speaks to the camera about how the Amazon is the world’s largest carbon sink (and its largest provider of rain) and why its destruction poses an existential threat to our entire species. Hailing from Brazil’s Upper Rio Guama territory, Indigenous activist Puyr Tembé approaches the same truth from a more personal perspective. His people have defended their lands against colonizers for over 400 years—a worldwide dynamic that has forced Indigenous peoples, just five percent of the global population, to protect 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity—and resulted in more than 600 volunteer forest guardians being murdered for illegal logging since 2014.
From his home village of Zutiwa, the group’s regional coordinator, Marçal Guajajara, laments that every tree that was cut down represents a life in itself. But removing the logging companies responsible for taking these lives is not a simple matter of patrolling the forests; the companies have been enabled by the rampant corruption of the Bolsonaro administration, financed by an international consortium of the world’s most powerful banks, and dependent on the labor of exploited villagers who cannot afford not to work for them.
Valdir Duarte knows his work is “wrong,” and yet—after being forced to drop out of school and leave his family when he was just eight—he has no other means of feeding the children he rarely sees. Not that Duarte’s circumstances inspire any sympathy from landowners like Tadeu Fernandes, who dedicates his life to ecological preservation and is not above threatening violence against illegal loggers he encounters on his land.
“We Are Guardians” is certainly more willing to acknowledge Duarte as the victim in this mess, but—as you might infer from the film’s title—there’s never any doubt about who the heroes are in this story. Surprisingly, the film reserves the same doubt for the efficacy of its cause. The kind of film that ends with a QR code, “We Are Guardians,” exists to inspire people to action in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances, and to the extent that the documentary achieves this goal, it does so by emphasizing how moral clarity is the most effective weapon against an intractable web of sin—for small victories that can eventually add up.
There are only a handful of actual scenes in the film (most of its running time consists of interview testimonies), but Tembé’s encounter with a flotilla of indigenous Açaí thieves is remarkable enough to resonate throughout. The situation has the potential to turn violent at any second, even though the thieves insist their weapons are only for protection against jaguars, but Tembé fends them off, reminding them that their actions are hurting themselves.
“We Are Guardians” is spreading too thinly to sit with the gathering and trace its ramifications in detail, but the simplicity of this moment is galvanizing in itself, if only because it suggests that individual people still have the power to save our planet from Indigenous people (a power reaffirmed by Bolsonaro’s defeat and the elections of several unworthy people). The film awes the work that Brazil’s Indigenous people have been doing on this front for centuries, and at the same time encourages the rest of us to join their fight, because it is our fight, too.
Grade: B-
Area 23A will release “We Are Guardians” in New York City theaters on Friday, July 11th.
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