(“The Dark Side of Green” exploring indigenous land struggles in Brazil), our director Nico Muñoz executed an innovative outreach campaign: the Guarani Kaiowa communities who shared their stories in the film were given ownership of broadcast rights and succeeded in negotiating sales with the Brazilian government as well as global NGOs, which translated the work into several languages. Physical copies were distributed at the United Nations Rio+20 Climate Conference in 2012. The tribes continue to use the film as material to further the cause of land protection.
In the south region of Mato Grosso do Sul, in the border of Brazil and Paraguay, the most populous indigenous nation of the country silently struggle for its territory, trying to contain the advance of its powerful enemies. Expelled from their lands because of the continuous process of colonization, more than 40,000 Guarani Kaiowá live nowadays in less than 1% of their original territory. Over their lands there are now thousands of hectares of sugarcane planted by multinational enterprises that, in agreement with the government, show ethanol to the world as an environment friendly and “clean” fuel. Without the lands and the forests, the Guarani Kaiowá have been coexisting for years with a malnutrition epidemic that reach their children. With no alternative of subsistence, adults and kids are exploited in the cane fields in exhausting working days. In the production line of the “clean” fuel, the Federal Public Prosecutor constantly sues the owners of the plants because of the child labor and the slave labor found there. Amid the delirium of the green gold fever (the way people call sugarcane), indigenous leadership that face the imposed power many times find as their fate the death ordered by the big farmers. Título Original: À Sombra de um Delírio Verde Documentário (The Dark Side of the Dark)