Film Imagines US-Annexed Amazon in Post-Coup Brazil
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Vitória Régia is a 21-minute short film directed by Denis Kamioka (Cisma), set in 2025 after a successful far-right coup that hands the Amazon to the US, starring award-winning actor Alice Braga as journalist Carol barred from the rainforest without a visa.
- Denis Kamioka said the film was shot in March 2025 "nearly a year before Donald Trump ordered Nicolás Maduro's abduction," with the director and star both noting that fiction and reality kept "competing" during production.
- The film was made in collaboration with two Indigenous networks, Coiab and Apib, and features Guajajara actor Ywyzar Tentehar, 23, who said loggers, ranchers, and land-grabbers continue invading her demarcated territory in Buritizal "and nothing is done."
- The film's alternate reality depicts a "green and yellow dagger revolution" installing a military regime, purging ideological "deviants," cutting communications, and transferring Amazon control to Washington in exchange for coup support — a scenario Brazil escaped in real life when Bolsonaro's 2022 plot failed and plotters were jailed.
- Flávio Bolsonaro is poised to challenge President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October's election and was recently accused of offering the US access to Brazil's rare-earth reserves — some of the world's largest — in exchange for campaign help.
- Alice Braga urged voters to "properly study the candidates rather than taking the same journey that led us to Bolsonaro's election," warning that another Bolsonaro win could reignite the deforestation surge seen during 2019-23, when anti-Indigenous policies drove soaring destruction and a gold rush into Indigenous lands.
- The film takes its name from the water lily used as a symbol by Indigenous dissidents within the story, and co-creator Pedro Inoue said its pop aesthetic and stirring soundtrack were designed to counter despair with an upbeat message about Indigenous resistance.
Why it matters: With Flávio Bolsonaro running in October's election and accused of offering US access to Brazil's rare-earth reserves, the film's election-year release is an explicit intervention. Activists and the film's creators argue another Bolsonaro presidency could reverse Lula's environmental protections and reignite the deforestation surge of 2019-23, when anti-Indigenous policies drove record land destruction and a gold rush into Indigenous territories.
