Interview: Director Alex Pritz on indigenous voices, environmental destruction, and exploring ‘The Territory’

The Uru-eu-wau-wau, an indigenous people living in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, take center stage in director Alex Pritz’s The Territory, an involving documentary that feels particularly potent because of the role its subjects had in the production, filming their own footage during COVID-19 to prevent exposure for their members.

We had the chance to speak with Pritz about what sparked his interest in this topic and how he recognizes that the people he wanted to speak to would have every right to be suspicious of him. He marveled at the collaborative experience and particularly the memorable reception the film has received within Brazil.

Read or watch the full interview below!

Abe Friedtanzer: I’m so thrilled to be speaking with Alex Pritz about one of the best documentaries of the year, The Territory. How are you, Alex?

Alex Pritz: I’m good. Thank you so much, Abe.

AF: Of course, of course. I was looking at your website while I was doing a little bit of research for this interview, following having seen the film, and I like that you said that you’re interested in “human’s relationship with the natural world.” That strikes me as the perfect catalyst to this film’s subject matter, but I’m curious if you can tell me how it is that you got to Brazil and this focus.

AP: Yeah. A lot of my work focuses on this. I didn’t study film, actually, I studied an interdisciplinary program in environmental science and philosophy. And so these complicated issues, where humans are living in and part of the world, we’re not separate from it, but we rely on it in order to survive, and yet we’re at the same time destroying large parts of it, creates all these different types of conflicts. Looking at the people living on the front lines of a lot of these issues is something I’ve been focused on for a little while.

This particular story came into my life when I read about Neidinha Bandeira, the amazing sixty-year-old activist at the center of our film, who has spent forty years defending the environment, the rainforest, indigenous rights, and doing it in a part of the world where almost everybody is against her. And so in 2018, as Bolsonaro was running for election, I reached out to her and said, “Look, I love what you’re doing. I think you’re one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever heard of, and your life could get turned upside down if he wins the election. Could I come and meet you?” And so I borrowed $1000 from two friends, and that got me a ticket to Brazil, and one thing led to another.

AF: Wow. And it feels like the Uru-eu-wau-wau people are very open to you and to having cameras there, but also they have plenty of reasons not to be.

AP: Yeah, absolutely. Through Neidinha, I was introduced to the indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people, who are the defenders of the largest area of intact rainforest in this part of the Amazon. And they’re extremely distrustful and skeptical of outside journalists and media, me in particular, to start, because of the way that they’ve been treated historically by the media and by outside forces. I remember when I first got to the Uru-eu-wau-wau, and it was before I even really started filming, there was a linguist who had come and was meeting with them to try to help write down their language. Tupi-Kawahíva is a language spoken by something in the hundreds of people left on Earth. And so the members of the different villages came together and sat and discussed the proposal to write down their language, and they came back and said, “No, we’re really not into that, because if you write down our language, we know what happens next. We’ll have to pay to speak our language and we don’t want that. We’re not interested.”

For me, that was this really important realization that like, holy shit, so much has been taken and exploited and stolen from this community by people who look like me, who behave culturally like me, who speak like me. On the flip side, this idea of ownership over your own narrative, over your own culture and your story, was going to be really important going forwards. And that informed a lot of the participatory way in which we set up The Territory.

AF: And you also share a cinematography credit with a member, which is very, very cool.

AP: Yeah, I’m proud to have worked alongside Tangãi Uru-eu-wau-wau, who shot major portions of the film from his perspective. It was a huge learning experience for me. I came into this thinking, I’m also a cinematographer and shoot a lot of my own material, and thought I have a really strict idea of how I want the aesthetics for this film to look and feel. And when COVID came along, I didn’t have physical access to members of the Uru-eu-wau-wau. For over a year I couldn’t meet them, couldn’t enter their territory. And so for that year, Tangãi and other members of the community picked up cameras and filmed themselves.

The footage they came back with was so much better than any of the stuff I had shot prior. It was a really important lesson for me that seeing things in that unmediated, unfiltered, raw format from the actual protagonists’ hands and through their eyes just was a better experience for the audience, period. It really opened up a lot of creative possibilities for us, as well as important ways in which the film got restructured as a co-production, so the community received an equal portion of the profits of the sale of the film and became a much more equitable enterprise overall, I think.

AF: Yeah, as I’m thinking back to some of those scenes, I’m picturing two radically different documentaries. One of them is Catfish, which obviously, thematically is nothing like this. And the other is Man on Wire, because the idea is that you’re following what’s happening, you’re in it. It’s not a documentary in the sense of we’re interviewing people, we’re talking, it’s that we’re here, this is our lives. And also there’s something thrilling and intense and it has really high stakes about it.

AP: Yeah. That was one thing we knew we wanted from the very beginning, that stayed true the whole time, was the idea that this needed to be a present-tense film. That we weren’t going to tell the audience something had happened last week. You needed to be there experiencing it alongside them because this is an active conflict with really high stakes. This is a life or death thing for people living in the Amazon and for all of us, really, that want to continue to live on this beautiful planet. That forest needs to remain standing. It’s a life or death matter for our whole species. And so, trying to convey that in a way that brought the audience there through the cinematography, through the sound design, and made it as immersive as possible, that was one of the main goals.

AF: It’s also very poignant and upsetting to learn of the death of one of the activists throughout this film. I’m sure that that was a very powerful experience just in the process of this whole thing.

AP: Yeah. That was by far the most difficult moment in production. This is a community of 150-ish people. And so when you lose somebody, a thirty-two-year-old man who’s a father of two children, who’s a teacher in a local school, a son, a husband, it leaves a huge hole. Somebody who’s really active in the territorial surveillance of their land. It left a massive hole and was really difficult for our team, obviously for the community, and for a while we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to continue just because it became so risky, so emotionally difficult to even talk about some of these things. But through that grief, I think we were able to come together as a team and realize that the best way we understood to honor him and his work was to try to tell the world about what it was that he was part of and what he was fighting for.

AF: Absolutely. And I think it’s also jarring how flagrantly people just show up and say, “We’re taking this land, we’re burning it.” You and me, we’re both American. I think that we’re seeing similar calls to take back what you want and all these things from right-wing factions within our own government. I’m sure those parallels are not lost on you or, I hope, on anyone viewing this film.

AP: Yeah. We see it now in America with this nostalgia for the good old days that were good for some, horrible for others. And we see that in present-day Brazil in these frontier communities who have adopted the American ideology, these ideas of manifest destiny, of divine right to the land. The idea that land is somehow empty, devoid of people or life until you as a settler come along and chart your maps of it.

All of those are complete falsehoods, but they are the founding mythology of America. The story of pilgrims, westward expansion of the United States. And you see that reflected in these Brazilian settlers, in their physical iconography, their cowboy hats, their big belt buckles. They adore the American West, but it’s also a betrayal of these much deeper forms of admiration that they have for America as a fellow colonial project that did away with a lot of native land and killed a lot of indigenous people here in North America.

AF: It’s also interesting the parallel to COVID-19 and the idea of, well, this is a people that’s dealt with illnesses being brought and not having immunity, all these things. And it’s so fascinating to see how they approach this pandemic.

AP: Yeah. Without speaking for indigenous people, I’m not indigenous, one of the things I was really impressed with was the resilience and the resistance, really, that the Uru-eu-wau-wau displayed in spite of all these challenges. And COVID-19, and the response to it, is a perfect example of that. When the disease arrived, the elders in the community remembered vividly in 1981 when they came into first contact with the Brazilian state. They were forcibly assimilated, went from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to existing as part of the Brazilian state, more or less.

That brought a huge amount of foreign diseases, tuberculosis, measles, that killed more than half their population within two years. The historical memory of that loomed large for the community and they said, “Look, we’re taking this super seriously. Nobody into or out of our territory for a year. Until everybody’s vaccinated, we’re in full quarantine.” And that return to the land, the return to self-reliance, especially for the younger generation like Bitaté, meant that they took matters into their own hands. They were using cameras and drones and technology to document the invasions that they had been experiencing and led to these huge breakthroughs in terms of their ability to fight back against these foreign invaders.

AF: I know the film has had a very positive reception at Sundance, and being acquired by National Geographic, etc.. What has the response been like in Brazil?

AP: We started at É Tudo Verdade, a Brazilian film festival. It was probably the most emotional screening I think we’ve had. About half the audience was indigenous. And to see other indigenous communities recognizing the Uru-eu-wau-wau, quite small, you know, 150 people. But to see the way that they have thought back and militantly resisted this encroachment was really moving to be part of.

We had a theatrical release in Brazil just three weeks before people went to the polls in the latest presidential election. That was a real goal of ours, to have this film be out before the next presidential election, and available in Brazil so that people could head to the polls thinking about the past four years and what Bolsonaro’s political legacy has meant for the environment, for indigenous people, and bringing that into the political conversation. And we’re really excited in 2023 to have a much wider rollout. It’ll be on Disney+ beginning of the year in Brazil, and then community screenings and a lot of places that don’t have internet or access to streaming services, and trying to make the conversation as broad and accessible as possible.

AF: That’s great. And I know it’s also on Disney+ already in the United States, which is great because I think Disney, it’s a place you go for Marvel and Star Wars, and sometimes you can go for some heavier, important nonfiction films as well.

AP: Yeah, absolutely. We hope! It’s been really cool in our theatrical release in the United States to see how many young people were actually coming out to the theaters. Our protagonist is this eighteen-year-old indigenous leader who’s just an absolute visionary, using drones and media in these really sophisticated ways. And I think there’s a message of hope in that, that young people are taking control and taking the reins and are capable of leading all of us into the next century.

AF: Do you have a next project that you’re already working on?

AP: I have some ideas I’m really excited about, but I have also just put so much into this film. It’s  my first film, my first feature documentary I’ve ever directed, and I’ve just got to see this thing through. It’s my baby.

AF: It’s great that it made the DOC NYC shortlist. I’m hoping it will also make the Oscar shortlist. This is a really, really fantastic film. I’m curious also, what are some other great documentaries that you’ve seen recently that you would recommend to people who want something else to look at after The Territory?

AP: Oh my gosh. So many great films this year. A Brazilian film, The Last Forest, is another film made in a participatory way with the community about an indigenous group, the Yanomami. Mija, I really love, by Isabel Castro, that’s out this year. So many good films. We’re awash in them this year. It’s a really amazing year for documentaries.

AF: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with me, and good luck with this film and whatever comes next.

AP: Thank you so much, Abe.

The Territory is currently streaming on Disney+. Read our review here.