EXTRACTION
A family story reveals the structures behind the white invasion of the Amazon during the 19th and 20th centuries.
SYNOPSIS
EXTRACTION connects global history to the intimate story of the Brasil family, who, since the 19th century, have inhabited various towns in the interior of the Amazon. Director Priscilla Brasil — great-granddaughter of rubber tappers, granddaughter of a violent dictatorship agent, and daughter of a road and mining plant builder — narrates, from a deeply personal perspective, the progression of the invasion and destruction of the forest by white settlers and by her own family throughout the 20th century.
Through archival research across Brazil, the United States, and Europe, and by revisiting family memories, the film uncovers how extractive capitalism has shaped the Amazon — not only economically and environmentally, but also culturally and epistemologically. The documentary exposes how today’s greenwashed discourse hides the continuation of historical exploitation, now operating through the capture of minds, culture, and memory.
Part of the filming will take place during a camp of Indigenous and traditional leaders resisting the greenwashing of COP30 — which will be held on the grounds of the former Brasil family home, on the outskirts of Belém, where the director was born and raised.
More than a story about the forest, EXTRACTION is a political and emotional journey into the roots of power, silence, and resistance.
ARGUMENT
I’ve always been the one in the family who collects what others try to erase — memory boxes, forgotten letters, torn photographs. I was around eight the first time I saved something. My grandfather had just stormed out after a family scandal, and my grandmother, furious, started tearing up every photo of him. I stopped her. I said the photos were mine. I would keep them.
This film begins with that box of images — and with a truth I discovered only decades later. Those weren’t family portraits. They were photos of a juvenile reformatory tied to the most feared prison in the Brazilian Amazon — Cotijuba Island, known as the “Amazonian Alcatraz.” My grandfather had been its director.
Instead of hiding that legacy, I decided to investigate. To understand my grandfather’s role, I traveled back to Sena Madureira, in Acre, where my family first settled in the late 19th century. My great-grandfather was a pharmacist and a rubber plantation owner. The region was still Bolivian territory at the time. While they managed rubber extraction — with mostly enslaved labor — they witnessed the land being sold to Brazil in exchange for a railway: the Madeira-Mamoré, known as the railway of death.
Many of the documents I needed no longer exist in Brazil. But I found them at Harvard — in the archives of an American overseer who helped design the region’s extractive economy. His planning displaced entire populations, including mine. There, I found racial diagrams and policies for “civilizing” the forest, which included whitening the population — not just genetically, but culturally.
This desire for control shaped everything in my family — from the way we arranged furniture to the way we organized power. My great-grandfather created even a horseback tournament to discipline the population. It's still held today and is now part of Acre’s official heritage.
I returned to Cotijuba. The prison is gone, but the Amazon remains one of the most violent regions in Brazil. Militia groups, illegal gold, organized crime — all flourish under the forest canopy.
My father, a retired engineer, never supported the military but spent decades building for the Carajás Project, the largest mineral extraction venture on Earth. He told me how, even in the 1980s, it was common for the police to sell prisoners to local businessmen — a normalized form of slavery. Today, the same companies that fueled this violence now lead the global conversation on sustainability — and sponsor COP30, happening in my city, Belém.
I am the fourth generation of the Brasil family. I was born as part of the system that extracts everything from the Amazon. It ends with me. I refuse to carry this cycle forward. We have the power to break it.
More than a story about the forest, EXTRACTION is a political and emotional journey into the roots of power, silence, and resistance.
"EXTRACTION” is an investigative documentary based on family memories, personal and historical archives, and on an ethnographic and critical approach to space. It seeks to understand the transformations endured and the power relations that still exist in the Amazon region.
Over the past 150 years, my family moved through the forest territories, following the processes of colonization/invasion in the region. The false promises of development led to degradation, violence, and countless traumas suffered both by traditional populations and by those who migrated here.
Through encounters and the review of documents and archival materials, I propose an analysis of power relations based on memory and the juxtaposition of historical fragments, reorganized through constellations of images. Mediated by archives and by the memories of those who remained in the places my family passed through, the film aims to frame the debate on occupation in the name of "development" and on the legacy this has left behind.
I believe that editing, as a tool of thought, is capable of revealing new possibilities by dismantling established certainties and discourses. It allows us to think through differences and through the gaps left between archival fragments. Editing makes simultaneity of times possible (in this case, over a century) and unveils the flaws, the conflicts, the heterogeneity.
And if the film’s montage serves all of this, then it also serves the decolonization of gazes and methodologies—and it will serve to tell the hidden stories from the remote corners of Brazil. To articulate memory, narration, and history in the search to grasp reality is what we propose in this film.
To achieve these goals, however, it is essential to understand the encounter with myself and with my personal traumas as a crucial part of the documentary. I carry traumas that are not mine alone, but also collective wounds and violences born from the process of invasion and occupation of that territory.
In the journeys I propose, I aim to reestablish encounters with those who remained in these places as a central part of the narrative—something that has been increasingly neglected in recent decades. The search for silence has become more and more prevalent in filmmaking, in an attempt to give the viewer agency to fill in the gaps left by the author. However, the voices of the invisibilized have been further silenced by these choices. In areas of conflict and scarce documentation, it seems to me that this needs to change.
I propose a film that returns to listening—to how people construct meaning not only about their own lives, but also about the spaces they inhabit and the power structures they endure.
Thus, my narration does not impose itself as a voice of God over the material—it does not declare, nor does it claim certainty. It is structured from the very incompleteness of the process. The narration I propose is deeply personal, though critical, and it shines a light on the background of the frame—on what history has disregarded, on what has been deemed disposable or unimportant by the discourse of the oppressor.
I propose an investigative documentary in the form of an essay film, narrated by the author herself from an explicitly personal perspective. At the same time, the film is ethnographic in its effort to understand the transformations experienced by the forest and the power relations that persist within it.
The decolonial essay emphasizes the construction of discourse from the voices and ideas of Amazonian thinkers, lifting them out of invisibility and silence.
DIRECTOR´S STATEMENT
