The people who live along Brazil’s Xingu River are facing man-made Armageddon. The massive Belo Monte Dam, one of the world’s most contested infrastructure projects, has caused untold ecological and social devastation throughout the entire region, displacing more than 40,000 local residents. Director Rogerio Soares travels into this mythic and brutalized world to encounter some of its most vulnerable and inspiring inhabitants. Blending informed analysis with Baroque aesthetics and Latin American magic realism, he crafts an arresting and poetic river movie, offering a rare and deeply empathetic look into the lives of people caught in the ruinous path of “disaster development.”

The Belo Monte Dam, one of the world’s biggest and most controversial infrastructure projects, is causing massive ecological and social devastation along Brazil’s Xingu River. Director Rogerio Soares travels into this mythic and brutalized world to encounter some of its most vulnerable and inspiring inhabitants.

The Xingu River, a major tributary of the Amazon, provides lifeblood to one of the planet’s most distinctive and diverse ecosystems.

But that ecosystem and its inhabitants are now facing man-made Armageddon. One of the world’s biggest infrastructure projects, the hotly contested Belo Monte Dam, is nearing completion, part of a gargantuan plan to build more than 400 dams throughout the Amazon region.

Decried as “disaster development” at its most calamitous, Belo Monte has disrupted the entire regional watershed, causing untold social and ecological damage—and displacing over 40,000 local residents. Many have been relocated to the chaotic shantytowns of Altamira, one of Brazil’s fastest growing and most violent cities.

With River Silence, the Brazilian-born filmmaker Rogerio Soares travels deep into this mythic and brutalized world to encounter its most vulnerable and inspiring inhabitants.  Blending informed analysis with deep empathy, he crafts a rare and timely look into the lives of people caught in disaster development’s ruinous path.

Composed as a poetic “river movie”—fluid, constantly in motion, sometimes gentle, at other times violent—the feature-length film focuses on four women-centred households as they struggle to navigate a critical moment in their collective history.

Francinete fends for her multigenerational family on the ragged periphery of Altamira. Tamakwera and her husband Rosinei, cut adrift from their Indigenous Parakanã culture, have been caught in the wave of aggressive evangelical Christianity that’s currently sweeping through Brazil. And while Raimunda resolves to rebuild her home and livelihood, Karliane bravely faces down the state authorities who’ve been sent to evict her and other local families from their homes.

Soares’ unique brand of observational cinema, anchored in extensive journalistic experience, is informed by Baroque aesthetics and Latin American magic realism. Looking on as a family mourns the death of an infant boy, a tiny body in a tiny white coffin, Soares presents the scene as a modern-day pietà, infusing the moment with heartbreaking sorrow and dignity.

The mesmerizing cinematography is by Glauco Bermudez and Aldo Oviedo Tejo, and the wondrously evocative soundscape is the work of Catherine Van Der Donckt, Benoît Dame and Jérémie Jones.

River Silence is co-produced by EyeSteelFilm (Bob Moore, producer) and the National Film Board of Canada (Annette Clarke, producer) in association with TVO. Executive producers are Mila Aung-Thwin and Daniel Cross for EyeSteelFilm; Annette Clarke for the NFB; and Jane Jankovic for TVO.

The Amazon is a kind of spiritual home to me, a place that never stops feeding my dreams and imagination, a place that shapes my understanding of the world. I feel a deep affinity with its inhabitants, and with River Silence I wanted to accompany them somehow as they live through a kind of apocalypse.

I first visited the region as an 18-year-old. I’d grown up in the Brazilian south, a modern and very different world, and I was immediately taken with the atmosphere and narrative of the Amazon—its slow pace, its heavy rains and humidity, its unbearable heat and its many rivers. I returned later, in the 1990s, to work as a United Nations consultant, and not long after that my parents decided to move there. I have lived in many places since then—New York, London, Sydney, Paris, Toronto and, most recently, Montreal—but the Amazon remains home on some deep level.

I have made several short films about the Amazon for Al Jazeera (USA) and TV Cultura (Brazil), but River Silence is my first feature film. I think of it as a “river movie”—a film in constant flow that illustrates the changes occurring in a region that until recently was relatively untouched. But today there are very few spaces in the Amazon that have not been affected by “development.” It’s a region in constant transformation. An epic narrative is playing out there, highlighting the dichotomy between creation and destruction, life and death, happiness and sorrow, the new and the archaic.

Our story begins on the banks of the mighty Xingu River, where the world’s fourth-largest dam is nearing completion. Modern-day corporations and government bodies have taken on the role of their colonial forbearers. Bribery, corruption, violence, environmental destruction and ethnocide are commonplace—all justified in the name of economic growth.

Unlike in earlier colonial times, the pace is astonishingly rapid. In today’s globalized economy, huge changes take place in a matter of days and months, not years. In the five years since I started researching and shooting this film, I’ve witnessed these changes firsthand: disappearing fish populations, entire forests replaced by cattle ranches, riverside communities forcibly relocated to urban areas, Indigenous people resisting, armed with nothing but their voices. The Amazon is eroding quickly because its peoples, who have coexisted in this environment for centuries, are vanishing.

The film features four women: Francinete, Tamakwera, Karliane and Raimunda. Each has her own distinct story. Each has experienced her own tragedy. And each is persevering amidst massive changes. Their hope is often expressed through an appeal to the sacred, as they call upon higher powers to intercede on their behalf, to grant them salvation or redemption. The Amazon is an all-encompassing world and its peoples tend to see themselves as part of a grand scheme. Life would seem senseless without this belief in some form of divine power.

Despite the suffering we witness in River Silence, my subjects are not victims. Hope and survival are intrinsic to the story. Their love for their children and grandchildren represents their hope for a better future. Each in her extraordinary way reminds us of the daily rituals that make us human.