The Lung of the Earth: Richard Ladkani’s Defining Portrait of Juma Xipaia in ‘Yanuni’ [VIDEO INTERVIEW]
For more than a decade, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Richard Ladkani has shaped some of the most urgent environmental documentaries of our time. With films like The Ivory Game and Sea of Shadows, he has exposed the criminal enterprises and ecological crises threatening vulnerable species and fragile ecosystems, crafting work that plays with the emotional propulsion of a thriller while remaining grounded in real-world stakes. But when the Amazon was burning during the summer he premiered Sea of Shadows, Ladkani realized something startling: “Why can’t I recall a film about the Amazon and what’s happening there that I’ve ever connected to? I couldn’t name one.” The more he watched the global conversation revolve around the fires, the more he felt what was missing was empathy. The Amazon, he says, is “the lung of planet Earth, the heart of planet Earth,” and he sensed “maybe there’s an opportunity.”
That opportunity to make Yanuni emerged through Juma Xipaia, a young Indigenous leader in Brazil whose courage had made her both a symbol of resistance and a target. “Somehow this name, Juma Xipaia, popped up… but that one name stuck out,” he recalls. A journalist warned him before connecting them that “she’s been in hiding for a year now… she just survived the sixth attempt on her life.” Yet the moment they finally spoke, something clicked. “I felt this deep empathy for her. This emotional connection was immediate… She’s so powerful; she’s so unique. There’s such a way of poetry when she speaks that I felt I found my subject.”
But trust required care, humility, and security. Juma refused to speak freely because of the translator. “This person could give away information that could, like, kill me,” she told him. In that moment, Ladkani realized, “I’m really diving into a very serious issue here.” He responded not with demands but with empowerment: “I said, look, you’re going to guide the story. I want to give you the producers’s credit… If you allow me in, you will guide the way.” Her reply stayed with him: “Never has a white person before arrived and given me control.” Determined to remove every barrier, he spent six months learning Portuguese. “Six months later, I spoke Portuguese.”
The shoot’s dangers matched the gravity of her life. While documenting the destruction of illegal gold-mining ships, Ladkani found himself trapped beside a burning vessel. “We almost blew up, like literally, an explosion was imminent within seconds.” As armed men tried to shoot the chain freeing their boat, he remembers seeing “the desperation on their faces,” escaping “literally in the last second.”
Equally painful were the emotional crises, like at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, where Juma learned that a close friend had died. “She started breaking down… and that was so intense and so sad.” His filmmaking philosophy—“Follow the story, follow the story,” allowed him to embed so deeply that Juma once looked up during an emotional moment with her husband and said, “Oh, you’re still here?” later laughing that he had become “like this piece of furniture in the corner.”
The Leonardo DiCaprio-supported Yanuni has since screened at 35 festivals and won 20 and has been embraced by Indigenous communities who told him, “This is our struggle.” But for Ladkani, the film is not just a documentary; it is a call to action. As he says, “We’re all on the same boat… protecting the Amazon means protecting the air we breathe in New York, or in Los Angeles.” And for those moved to support Juma directly, he points viewers to their online hub: “If you go to our Instagram profile, @Yanuni Film, you will find in the link in bio all the information on how to support Juma, her institute and her people.” But mainly, he wants to incentivize people to rethink our connection as human beings to nature, “and that we need to protect nature for all of us to have a future and live a beautiful and healthy life.”
Yanuni is still looking for distribution but is available to screen on the Academy portal.
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