Editors Note: This review is part of a series of reviews from the Hot Docs Festival that took place from April 27th to May 7th 2023 in Toronto, Canada.
We Are Guardians follows a group of forest activists in Tenetehara as they protect their homes from illegal loggers despite the great risk to their own lives. The film is set against the backdrop of political upheaval in Brazil and the deforestation of the Amazon.
We Are Guardians
Edivan Guajajara (director and cinematographer), Chelsea Greene (director, editor and cinematographer), Rob Grobman (director, editor and cinematographer), Atanas Georgiev (editor), Carla Roda (editor)
Valdir Duarte, Marçal Guajajara, Tadeu Fernandes, Puyr Tembe, Luciana Gatti, Sonja Guajajara (cast)
May 4, 2023 (Hot Docs)
I didn’t think I’d be able to catch We Are Guardians at Hot Docs 2023, but I was offered a screener of the film to review. I’m thrilled I got to see it because this is a powerful and necessary film.
We Are Guardians gives viewers several perspectives on one pressing issue—the Amazon is fast being cut down and the entire world will suffer the consequences. The film interviews Marçal Guajajara, regional coordinator of the Arariboia forest guardians, as he and his community protect the trees and their land. They also protect the uncontacted peoples—human populations who haven’t made contact with the outside world—that live within. The film also interviews large-scale farmers who don’t see any issue with stealing land from indigenous peoples.
A secondary plotline follows Tadeu Fernandes, who has been protecting an ecological sanctuary for nearly 40 years—only to have to deal with invaders who are causing irreversible deforestation in the Amazon.
Illegal logger Valdir Duarte also gets a voice in We Are Guardians, explaining why he does what he does—he holds no grudges against the Indigenous groups. Most of the loggers don’t. But most of them were forced to give up on their education to support their families and take up any work that came their way. Major corporations are buying the Amazon trees and exporting the wood abroad, often placing ‘legal’ stickers on illegally stolen trees.
The final story of We Are Guardians follows activist Puyr Tembe as she helps her community stop thieves from stealing plants off their land, while advocating to different tribes about the horrifying global changes deforestation in the Amazon will cause.
We Are Guardians is a tight cinematic experience, and I do think I missed out by not seeing it on the big screen. The gorgeous Amazon and the wildlife it houses would have been a sight in the theatre. And while the visuals are beautiful, they are also powerful—the images of the forest guardians training to fight the illegal loggers had my heart pumping. This is a community that has protected its lands for over 500 years — but they are not equipped to physically fight. Seeing the guardians armed with spears and arrows against loggers with guns was terrifying.
Indigenous director and cinematographer Edivan Guajajara brings an intimacy to We Are Guardians. By interviewing his own community of forest guardians, Guajajara manages to get unprecedented access to the way the group works. He also elicits strong reactions from Marçal, who becomes emotional talking about the indigenous land.
The storytelling of We Are Guardians is extremely well-woven, seamlessly intercutting between Marçal’s fight for his people, Fernandes’ countless complaints to practically every institution in Brazil, Duarte’s struggles with money, and Tembe’s political battle to be heard. All this with former Brazil president, Jair Bolsonaro, decreasing protections for the Amazon and his racism against Indigenous people. Listening to Bolsonaro so easily dismiss the Indigenous peoples on the land made me want to scream. As Marçal says, there are Indigenous people around the world, and it is infuriating that so many of them have to fight for what is rightfully theirs.
Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman, directors, editors, and cinematographers on We Are Guardians, also covered another Indigenous group trying to protect their land when they previously produced Borneo’s Vanishing Tribes. We can see how that earlier experience strengthened their ability to tell the many stories in this film.
I was surprised that We Are Guardians was produced by actor Fisher Stevens (The Blacklist, Succession) and that he’s already won Academy Award for Best Documentary for the 2010 film, The Cove, which dealt with Japan’s illegal dolphin hunting industry. Could We Are Guardians win Stevens another award? It’s certainly one of the more impressive documentaries I’ve seen at Hot Docs 2023.
What should terrify people watching We Are Guardians is the extreme deforestation occurring in the Amazon. Fernandes shows maps of the area in the film, and the speed at which trees have been lost—many of them over 150-200 years old—is a nightmare. Tembe shares the scientific fallout of this deforestation—the Amazon is pivotal to the global ecosystem, impacting rainfall and the climate. Deforestation and forest fires in the Amazon, much of which is caused by greedy corporations, can impact continents as far as Australia.
And let’s not tip-toe around this fact—global warming is terrifying. We are not supposed to live in heat-stroke-causing heat in so many parts of the world. Forest fires should not be this common. Floods shouldn’t be happening at the frequency and intensity that they have been. We, as individuals, can only do so much. We Are Guardians makes the case for more accountability from corporations and more direct action from politicians to stop the deforestation of an extremely important climate resource. But it also understands that political power is key to making these changes. The guardians fight the good fight, and they have sadly lost friends and family on the way, but the guardians, Tembe and Fernandes all realise that with Bolsonaro in power, it’s impossible to move the needle.
We Are Guardians finds positivity in Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva being sworn in as Brazil’s president. He has made promises to protect the Amazon but hopefully, it isn’t too late. The Amazon has been burning and it’s going to take the world with it. The people in power need to listen, and they need to listen now.
