Children of the Amazon

Denise Zmekhol, Producer/Director/Narrator

● Environment
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The expectant, innocent gazes of the beautiful, brown-eyed children of the Surui and Negarote tribes look out from photographs Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol took some 15 years ago. Now, as these captivating images lure her back to the rainforest to see what has become of this young generation of indigenous Amazonians, she is stunned by the dramatic changes in their way of life.

As massive deforestation wreaks havoc on their land, the now-grown children of once isolated tribes awkwardly straddle the worlds of their native traditions and of ever-encroaching Western civilization. Tribal leaders walk a treacherous line between economic survival and sustaining the legacy of cultural-environmental preservation of activists like Chico Mendes, who risked his life to forge an alliance between indigenous people and the rubber tappers who use the forest for their livelihoods.

Haunting music and lush cinematography beautifully render this life-and-death story that ultimately affects the entire planet.

Denise Zmekhol has many years of experience in virtually every aspect of television production, and speaks Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. A native of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Denise graduated in Social Communication/Journalism. She completed her studies in photography, film and broadcasting at San Francisco State University in the United States. Early in her career, Denise worked as a news cameraperson at Univision’s KDTV Channel 14, the Bay Area Spanish language station. She teamed up with Brazilian filmmaker Jose Araujo as Associate Producer on his acclaimed documentary, Landscape of Memories. When she returned to Brazil in 1987, Denise assisted on a number of documentaries filmed in the Amazon.

In addition to her documentary work, Denise produced the photo essay "Children of the Amazon," and shot the last photographs of renowned rubber tapper environmental activist Chico Mendes before his assassination. Her photos of Chico Mendes appeared in Time Magazine and many other publications worldwide. During the 90s, Denise worked as a freelance producer for numerous Sao Paulo production companies, creating a variety of marketing and public relations projects for Kelloggs, Max Factor, Pepsi, General Motors, Fiat and others. She quickly advanced to commercial directing, working on political and consumer spots. 

Zmekhol co-produced and co-directed Digital Journey, an Emmy award-winning PBS series exploring emerging technologies in their social, environmental and cultural contexts. In 1998, Denise returned to the United States, where she began a new collaboration with Robert Lundahl & Associates.

Children of the Amazon is available for purchase on the film's official website:

http://www.childrenoftheamazon.com

Survival International advocates for tribal communities all over the world:
http://www.survivalinternational.org/actnow

Amazon Watch works to protect the rain forest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin:
http://www.amazonwatch.org/

In 2008, Denise Zmekhol returned to the Amazon to film with the Surui tribe again — this time documenting its unique collaboration with Google Earth Outreach. The partnership, a result of Chief Almir Surui’s request that Google help raise visibility for his tribe, involves training the Surui people to use Internet technology to protect their forest, preserve their culture, and empower their people.

Over the 40 years since the BR-364 Highway was built directly through Rondonia, as seen in Children of the Amazon, Brazil has experienced a devastating loss of forest. The indigenous and rubber tapper communities directly impacted by this loss are working to prevent it. Google Earth Outreach is helping train the Surui tribe to use Internet technology to monitor and protect the forest.

In 1987, while working on several documentaries, Denise Zmekhol was one of many outsiders who traveled Highway BR-364 from São Paulo deep into the heart of the Amazon. The first time she drove from São Paulo all the way to Xapuri in the state of Acre. The blue markers are the photos from those trips. The yellow markers are the photos from 15 years later, when she returned to make the documentary Children of the Amazon.

Interview with Denise Zmekhol

t21: What is your greatest fear/concern for the indigenous communities and for the rubber tappers as a result of this destruction?

DZ: A lot of tribes in the Amazon became extinct because of big developments and roads. We don’t want to see that happening again. I really hope all this effort that some leaders and organizations are trying to do to make a difference really happens. It would be very devastating to see all these people disconnected from their forest, from their land. It’s a bigger deal than us losing parks, in the city. It’s huge for them.

t21: How can indigenous communities in the Amazon adapt to the modern world, and more importantly, does the younger generation of Surui and other indigenous communities like them want to adapt?

DZ: When I was traveling the Amazon one thing was common – the answer I got to a question about education was always that they felt education was very, very important. For the indigenous people, I think they find that education is a way to learn about our culture and a way of surviving in our culture. So they do look to education as a way to live in two worlds. It’s irreversible; there’s nothing you can do if you contact people and bring them our culture. The Surui, for example, live just one hour away from Cacou, which is a small town, like 100,000 people. So it’s very close to their village. They can even take a ride for an hour and they are in this small town. They also are using technology.
The Surui have a very visionary leader, Chief Almir, who became chief when he was 17. He was the first Surui to get a college education, and he used the Internet all the time. Now he’s living in this little town called Pouve because it’s close to the airport and he travels a lot. He’s using the Internet to fight illegal logging, so he basically was two years ahead of Google Earth outreach in using the Internet to share information worldwide in real time about illegal logging. He’s a visionary leader and I think that makes a big difference.

t21: Did you think of interviewing any of the loggers or ranchers during the course of making the film to see what they had to say about the whole issue?

DZ: I did think about it, and I had met some of them when I was in Cacao, but I decided then that I didn’t want to make a film that was a journalistic story that told both sides.

t21: What do you see in the future for the rubber tappers and the Surui people and other indigenous communities of the Amazon?

DZ: It’s so complex. Every community is in a different area, and it all depends upon who is the governor, who is the mayor, who is supporting them, do they have a pledge of support, do they have any government organization or indigenous organization working with them, who is the leader, etc.
But as I said, I think when you have a strong leader you can have a better future. [For example], Chief Almir is doing this 50-year plan, planting 130,000 saplings of hardwood in places where they were taken before 15 or 20 years ago, and he has plans for education, to bring back shamans to the village.

They have all these amazing projects that look very good on paper, but often it’s very hard to enforce the law in the Amazon because it’s such a huge area. Some places are very remote, have very remote access, and it’s so huge the government doesn’t have enough people to enforce the law. So by the time [for example] Chief Almir calls someone to look at some loggers in the village, and the government police get there, they [the loggers] are gone, or they [the police] don’t even come. I don’t know, I’m hoping with all this attention people are having toward the Amazon good things might happen from now on. Some tribes are using carbon credits to keep the forest standing. They want to prove that they can make more money than the loggers or cattle ranchers make by destroying the forest.

Every time we have a screening people say, “Can’t we remove the roads?” [but] there is no quick and easy fix. You have to bring awareness to a lot of people and most of the people who are farming in the Amazon, the loggers, they usually are people who are not well-educated and are there for the money. It’s like the last frontier.

You know, when you had the Gold Rush? It’s like that kind of mentality. The Amazon in Brazil is two-thirds of the country and Brazil is about the size of the U.S. without Alaska and Hawaii, so the Amazon is almost a continent itself. Some tribes have 200 years of contact with outsiders, some 40, some 10. Some don’t even speak Portuguese, some tribes love the language, some are bi-lingual; it’s so different, it’s like every place, every village, every culture, every tribe is different.

t21: Do people who are trying to protect the rainforest and fight against the ranchers and loggers, do they fear they will suffer a similar fate as Chico Mendes?

DZ: Yeah, there is a $100,000 bounty on Chief Almir’s head from the loggers. He was threatened so many times. They’ve been after him for many years. A lot of people have been killed. People are scared and, again, there’s no enforcement of the law; it’s the last frontier, and people can really get killed and that’s it. Nobody will take the responsibility, not even the government. It’s hard to find who the person is who kills. If a logger killed Chief Almir, maybe nobody would ever find out his murderer. They would hire a gunman and that would take care of it.

t21: You've probably heard about the case in which the court is allowing Chevron to subpoena footage from the film Crude, a documentary about the rainforest in Ecuador. As an investigative filmmaker yourself, what are your thoughts about that, and would your approach have changed if you knew the footage may have been subpoenaed?

DZ: No, I would do it anyways. I would fight for it. I think we have the right to tell stories; it’s our First Amendment right, right? We have freedom of expression, how can they take the footage? If they want copies they should pay very well; we can make DVDs [laughter]. If you make a copyright, we have a copyright to the footage, and if you are working with indigenous people they also have the right to it. In Brazil, there are laws that you have the author’s right and the person’s rights, so you have to have both rights to use indigenous people’s footage, for example. So there are rights, and I think they should respect our rights and the freedom of expression, We are trying to tell the truth and educate people, bring awareness, and hopefully engage people in taking action. Yeah, I saw that this morning, it was very disappointing.

t21: Is there anything you’d like to add?

DZ: I think if you want to add something about the Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops story, it’s a very nice and uplifting update. People love to see old traditional cultures using modern technology. In 40 years they went from the Stone Age to the Space Age; it’s amazing.

(You can find a link to Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops in the “MORE VIDEOS” section of the "INFO" tab.)

 

Denise’s “Children of the Amazon” photo essay was exhibited at the California Institute for Integral Studies in 2001, and later at the 14th Annual Solo Mujeres Exhibit at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, as well as Stanford University and UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies. In the process of preparing these exhibitions, Denise wondered what had become of her (once) young subjects. She returned to the Amazon to make a documentary about the lives of the children whose playfulness, curiosity and connection with the forest captured her heart 15 years ago. Children of the Amazon, which Zmekhol completed in 2008, received support from the Independent Television Service (ITVS). She is currently producing a documentary with Google Earth Outreach to train Indigenous Amazonian tribes how to use Google Earth to create maps to record cultural traditions and to monitor the forest against illegal logging.

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