‘The Territory’ Review: Indigenous Brazilians Stand Their Ground in an Urgent Environmental Docu-Thriller

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film CriticDual forces of climate change and cultural genocide overlap to devastating effect in “The Territory,” threatening not just a native community but a wider ecosystem — and cheered on by the actively hostile powers that be.

Riveting and despairing in equal measure, freshman director Alex Pritz’s documentary immerses us over the course of three years in the lives, livelihoods and dwindling homeland of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people, whose supposedly protected patch of Amazon rainforest is under attack from all sides by farmers, miners and settlers who think nothing of deforesting swaths of jungle that don’t belong to them.For the Uru-eu-wau-wau, themselves rapidly diminishing in number, fighting back is essential but ugly, and anybody hoping for a comfortingly inspirational takeaway from “The Territory” may be disappointed.

Instead, this short, sharply crafted Sundance premiere makes an impact with both its bleak, blunt messaging and its muscular formal construction, as the turf war in question takes on the heated urgency of a thriller.

And while the presence of Darren Aronofsky as a producer may be an additional draw to prospective distributors for this National Geographic-style doc, more telling production credits here go to the Uru-eu-wau-wau themselves.