Denise Zmekhol, Brazilian Amazon Documentarist
I traveled to the Brazilian Amazon on several occasions between 1987-1990 to assist on
television documentaries. During my journeys, I had the opportunity to visit many Indig-
enous communities, always with my camera by my side. What caught my eye were the
children. Born to parents who had relied on the rainforest for their survival, these children
were growing up surrounded by new ways—ways that were destroying the forest.
I was also drawn to the children of the rubber tappers…the people who harvest the wild
rubber trees. The trees they relied on were also being cut down. I photographed the leg-
endary rubber tapper Chico Mendes and his family. Chico had become renowned the
world over for his nonviolent resistance movement to protect the rainforest.
15 years later—and a world away—I returned to these slides, which were never printed,
never shared. The images brought back a particularly searing memory: a phone call from
Chico in December 1988, asking me to film his funeral. I told him he was crazy, he wasn’t
going to die, he had too much work to do. Two weeks later he was shot dead by a rancher.
Stirred by faces of the children in my photographs and haunted by Chico’s untimely death,
I was inspired to travel to the Amazon again—this time, to make a movie.
While I expected change, I was not prepared for the extent of it. So much of the forest had
been destroyed. My response to the loss is the creation of CHILDREN OF THE AMAZON
—a tribute to a people struggling to save their forest home. But the goal of the film is more
than to bear witness. I hope to offer insight to a distant and remote land while simultane-
ously drawing connections to our own lives. For we are—all of us— CHILDREN OF THE
AMAZON breathing the same air, walking the same planet, and in some sense that we
have yet to understand, sharing the same fate.
~ Denise Zmekhol
