Céline Cousteau and film crew in the Javari Valley reservation (Michael Clark)
In 1981, 9-year-old Céline Cousteau first went to the Amazon with her grandfather, Jacques-Yves. Twenty-five years later she went back with her father as he filmed Return to the Amazon, a project for PBS. On that expedition, she met some of the Indigenous peoples of the 33,000-square-mile Javari Valley Indigenous territory, located along Brazil’s Amazon border with Peru. A relationship unfolded, and a request was later made: Would Cousteau, as an environmental filmmaker who focuses on the relationship between nature and humans, return to the Javari to tell the story of the threats its people and their land faced?
Cousteau’s 2019 documentary, Tribes on the Edge, examines those forces, from ongoing illegal activities including hunting, gold mining, and deforestation to health crises and the dismantling of all protections of land and human rights by the Brazilian government. Cousteau discusses why she felt compelled to return to the jungle, the making of the documentary, and the how the struggle for survival that played out in the Amazon has implications that reach across the globe.
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