We Are Guardians – Raindance Film Festival 2023

Directors: Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman

In Britain we pay too little attention to the political experience of other countries, particularly those outside of Europe and America who we feel have little day-to-day relevance to our own experience. But the tenure of President Bolsano in Brazil has been devastating for the indigenous people protecting the Amazon Rainforest, lands they legally own, which have endured incursions from loggers and timber companies, cattle ranchers and miners to which law enforcement and the President himself turned a blind eye. Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman’s film screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023, We Are Guardians, makes the link between this far right political regime and the fight against climate change affecting us all.

Framed from multiple perspectives, Guajajara, Greene and Grobman follow representatives from two different tribes, Marçal Guajajara, an appointed guardian of the forest who tracks the loggers and poachers, trying to protect the Arariboia lands they inherited from their ancestors. Puyr Tembé sacrifices time with her family and the home she loves to work in the city, actively campaigning against the government and seeking protection of the legal rights of indigenous people, and others who takes the camera on a tour of devastated sites, explaining how tree markings lead the way for bulldozers that tear through previously untouched areas to build roads.

But We Are Guardians is also takes a balanced, view, capturing the stories of the loggers like Valdir Duarte and ranchers that the viewer sees cutting down trees. They too are living in poverty and argue that they need to cut the trees to make ends meet. Several even say that indigenous lands extend too far and without other work, they knowingly act illegally to feed their families, some of whom we meet along the way. One rancher suggests that the smallholder business are not the problem but the big firms taking more than they should to transfer illegally-obtained wood around the world to multinationals who turn a blind eye to its origins.

Guajajara, Greene and Grobman are not necessarily sympathetic to these latter views, as the final celebratory focus on the 2022 election suggests, bringing a change of regime and a sliver of hope that the rate of deforestation and the protection of indigenous lands can be reversed. But Guajajara, Greene and Grobman allow their subjects to tell this story in their own words, providing all of the narration as well as direct interviews with them, maintaining their own agency and keeping the filmmaker and his team in the background.

We Are Guardians is a film about the link between climate change and the largescale deforestation of the Amazon with stark graphics showing a frightening rate of destruction. It becomes a little repetitive in the middle where the film becomes bogged down in its dramatic style, going over old ground rather than moving the story along but Guajajara, Greene and Grobman’s film is a clear demonstration of not only why the Amazon needs protecting and the difficult human stories on all sides of the argument, but why we should all pay more attention to the political changes in places of considerable ecological value.

We Are Guardians is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023.