Executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, the scattered but stirring eco doc “We Are Guardians” assigns itself the unenviable challenge of providing a small — yet broadly comprehensive — window onto 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 a little more than 80 minutes; not by simplifying the situation, but rather by contrasting the apocalyptic plainness of the problem with the infinite complexity of solving it.
The facts speak for themselves, tragic as it is that they don’t always listen to each other. One of several people in the film who help to anchor the project as more of a prompt to activism than a searing work of art, climate scientist Luciana Gatti speaks to camera about how the Amazon is the world’s greatest absorber of carbon (and its greatest provider of rain), and why destroying it represents an existential threat to the whole of our species. Hailing from Brazil’s Alto Rio Guama territory, Indigenous activist Puyr Tembé approaches that same truth from a more personal perspective. Her people have been defending their land against colonizers for more than 400 years — a dynamic worldwide that has forced Indigenous people, just five percent of the global population, to protect 80% of the planet’s biodiversity — and has resulted in more than 600 volunteer members of the Forest Guardians being murdered by illegal loggers since 2014 alone.
From his home village of Zutiwa, the group’s Regional Coordinator Marçal Guajajara laments that every one of the trees that have been cut down represents a life in its own right. But fending off the logging companies responsible for taking those lives isn’t a simple matter of patrolling the forests; the companies were empowered by the rampant corruption of the Bolsonaro administration, funded by an international consortium of the world’s most powerful banks, and reliant upon the labor of exploited locals who can’t afford not to work for them.
Valdir Duarte knows that his job is “wrong,” and yet — after being forced to drop out of school and provide for his family when he was only eight years old — he has no other means of feeding the children he almost never gets to see. Not that Duarte’s circumstances inspire any sympathy from landowners like Tadeu Fernandes, who’s dedicated his life to ecological preservation, and isn’t above threatening violence toward the illegal loggers he finds on his land.
“We Are Guardians” is certainly more willing to recognize Duarte as a victim in this mess, but — as you might infer from the film’s title — there’s never any doubt as to who the heroes are in this story. More surprisingly, the film reserves just as little doubt for the effectiveness of their cause. The kind of movie that ends with a QR code, “We Are Guardians” exists to inspire people to take action in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances, and, to the extent the doc accomplishes that goal, it does so by emphasizing how moral clarity is the most effective weapon against an intractable network of sin — by how small victories can eventually consolidate into sweeping change.
There are only a handful of actual scenes in the film (most of its runtime consists of interview testimony), but Tembé’s encounter with a flotilla of Indigenous açaí thieves is remarkable enough to resonate for the duration. The situation has the potential to turn violent at any second, even if the thieves insist their guns are only for protection against jaguars, but Tembé defuses it by reminding them that their actions are ultimately hurting themselves.
“We Are Guardians” is spread way too thin to sit with the encounter and trace its ramifications in detail, but the simplicity of that moment is galvanizing in its own right, if only because it suggests that individual people still have the power to save our planet from the brink (a power reaffirmed by Bolsonaro’s defeat, and the election of several Indigenous people into the government). The film awes at the work that Brazil’s Indigenous people have been doing on that front for centuries, and at the same time encourages the rest of us to join in their fight, because it’s our fight too.
Grade: B-
Area 23a will release “We Are Guardians” in NYC theaters on Friday, July 11.
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