I just got around to watching Birdwatchers, a 2010 film by Italian/Chilean/Argentine/Brazilian director Marco Bechis about a group of Guarani-Kaiowà indigenous people in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state who decide to take back their ancestral land from a rancher.
It is not a Hollywood fantasy, not Avatar, not Dances with Wolves, not a feel-good movie, not an Oscar-grade downer of a movie, not pretty, but still gorgeous. It has a strong sense of place, doesn’t edit out the mud and toads and thick air of the Amazon. There are no cartoon bad guys, there are no cartoon good guys, and because of this you can never be quite sure what will happen next, which I like.
At its heart, it is character-driven and humanizing, and at its other heart it is a text-book case of how these kinds of things go: 1) Indigenous pushed off ancestral land and onto a reservation by farmers; 2) their way of life is ruined and they become a) slaves, b) starving, c) dead; 3) they try to take back their land; 4) powerful people with guns/lawyers stop/kill them. Human rights professors teaching units on collective and indigenous rights should start classes with this movie, because it has happened exactly like this all across the Americas (the world?) for centuries.
Amazingly, it is available on iTunes.