‘Amazon of America’: film paints vision of a post-coup Brazil giving up rainforest | Brazil

TThe year is 2025, and far-right coup plotters have destroyed Brazil’s democracy, assassinated the president, shut down the national congress, and handed over the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to America’s Amazon,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle land. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved into the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil.

Scenes are excerpts Vitoria Regia (Amazon Water Lily) is a new short film that imagines what might have happened if Jair Bolsonaro’s plan to seize power after the 2022 elections had been successful.

In real life, the coup plot failed after right-wing rebels swept through Brazil to overturn the result. Bolsonaro and his accomplices were tried and imprisoned.

The alternate reality presented to audiences in Vitória Régia offers a nightmarish vision of a future from which Brazil may have narrowly escaped, but where some fears may still lie ahead.

After the “green and yellow dagger revolution” eliminates Bolsonaro’s rivals, the military seizes power by censoring the media, purging ideological “heretics,” and handing control of the Amazon to Washington in exchange for supporting the coup.

Brazilian reporters like the film’s lead character, Carol (played by award-winning actor Alice Braga), were barred from entering the rainforest region without a visa, and a news blackout was imposed to prevent details of the environmental disaster from leaking out. Communications are cut off and Native leaders disappear.

Harold Goldman, the boss of an oil firm called Amazon

Director Denis Kamioka, known as Cisma, said the film was shot in March 2025, about a year before Donald Trump ordered the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. “take back” Venezuela’s oil. “It was frightening how fact and fiction were mixed together… We were constantly competing with reality,” he said.

Braga, who devoted herself to indigenous and environmental activism after first visiting the Amazon a decade ago, said: “It was crazy. We were making a fiction film… but then the US took this political stance with Trump… and it almost turned into a documentary.”

21 minute movie It was made in collaboration with two Indigenous networks, Coiab and Apib, to highlight the threats facing Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and support their centuries-long quest to defend their traditional lands.

Ywyzar TenteharThe 23-year-old indigenous actor, who plays a key character, said he hopes the project will draw attention to the ongoing assault he first witnessed while growing up in Buritizal, a village of Guajajara people in the eastern Amazon. “Today, the boundaries of my district have been drawn, but loggers, ranchers and land grabbers continue to invade… and nothing is being done,” Tentehar said.

As Bolsonaro’s politician son Flávio prepares to challenge incumbent leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for this year’s presidency, the Amazon’s already fragile future is once again at risk.

During Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-23 administration, his anti-environmental and Indigenous policies led to skyrocketing deforestation and a gold rush on Indigenous lands. Activists fear such widespread destruction could return if another Bolsonaro comes to power. Others fear for the future of South America’s largest democracy if a right-wing president pardons those jailed for their role in the 2022-23 failed coup.

Another real-life echo of the film was that Flávio Bolsonaro was recently accused of making an overture to the United States. Access to Brazil’s rare earth reserves – some of the world’s largest – in exchange for help in the October elections.

Braga said: “I’m really concerned. I hope people will properly vet the candidates instead of going through the same journey that took us to the election of Bolsonaro a few years ago… not just for the presidential candidates, but also for the congressional candidates.”

Graphic designer and activist Pedro Inoue, one of the film’s creators, said the film, inspired in part by a counterintuitively hopeful climate disaster novel called Ministry of the Future, is not all doom and gloom. He said his pop aesthetic and exciting music were designed to counter despair with an optimistic message about the power of Indigenous resistance.

“They’re the past, the present and the future. They’re the ones who have the answers to dealing with the end of the world because they’ve been dealing with it for over 500 years.”

Kamioka hoped that Vitória Régia, named after the lily-shaped symbol used by Indigenous dissidents in the film, would serve as “a warning of what can happen when sovereignty, Indigenous resistance, and democracy are at stake.”

He said: “This isn’t a movie about the distant future. That’s the scariest part. It’s about something that’s happening right now.”