The Territory (2022)
Director: Alex Pritz Run Time: 83 min. Rating: PG Release Year: 2022
Country: Brazil, Denmark, United States
Language: Portuguese, Tupi
About the film:
Audience Award and Special Jury Award winner at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. An immersive on-the-ground look at the tireless fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people against the encroaching deforestation brought by farmers and illegal settlers in the Brazilian Amazon.
With awe-inspiring cinematography showcasing the titular landscape and richly textured sound design, the film takes audiences deep into the Uru-eu-wau-wau community and provides unprecedented access to the farmers and settlers illegally burning and clearing the protected Indigenous land. Partially shot by the Uru-eu-wau-wau people, the film relies on vérité footage captured over three years as the community risks their lives to set up their own news media team in the hopes of exposing the truth.
“Gorgeously and sometimes ingeniously conceived, painting an intimate first-hand portrait of joy, pain, and community, before bursting with rip-roaring intensity as it captures a high-stakes struggle for survival unfolding in the moment.”
—Siddhant Adlakha for IndieWire
About the filmmaker:
Alex Pritz is a documentary filmmaker focused on the human relationship with the natural world. His feature directorial debut The Territory (2022) premiered in the World Cinema competition at Sundance 2022 where it won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Documentary Craft. He worked as cinematographer on Matt Heineman’s feature documentary The First Wave (2021) and Jon Kasbe’s When Lambs Become Lions (2018). He is a co-founder of Documist and has received grants from the Sundance Institute, IDA Enterprise Fund, Catapult Fund and Doc Society. He graduated from McGill University where he studied Environmental Science and Philosophy, and in 2012, he received an inaugural Dalai Lama Fellowship for his work developing film curriculums alongside low-income communities in the Philippines.
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