A Living Library of Ancestral Wisdom
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo, Co-creators invite you to view the latest movie in The Wisdom of the Ancestors Film Series Katô: Dreams of Dark Earth.
Katô invites us to step beyond the Western lens of “resources” and see the Amazon where humans are inseparable from nature—where trees and rivers are recognised as relatives.
Journey into the Tapajós River basin in the Brazilian Amazon, to the village of Sawré Muybu, home of the Munduruku people. Here, the community is fighting to protect not only their land and water, but also their knowledge, memories, and ways of life. Mercury pollution from illegal gold mining does more than contaminate the river—it disrupts the deep connection between the Munduruku people, their bodies, and the river that sustains them.
Katô follows the Munduruku through their long struggle for clean water and the right to their ancestral territory. In this place, everyday life itself has become an act of resistance. After years of waiting for official recognition that never came, the community chose to act on their own. They began the process of self‑demarcation, physically mapping and reclaiming their land, often at great personal risk.
Alongside this effort is a women‑led video collective that uses cameras as tools of resistance. Through their images, they document environmental destruction while also affirming the strength, dignity, and vitality of their people—things that cannot be mined or taken away.
At the heart of this struggle is Katô, also known as ancestral Dark Earth: soil enriched over generations through Indigenous knowledge and care. For the Munduruku, this soil is alive. It holds memory, history, and testimony to their presence on the land. Their fight is not only about one community or one river. It is part of a broader defence of the Amazon itself—the living system often called the lungs of the Earth, on which all life depends.
The film shows that when the rainforests are destroyed, and the land is scarred by mining or poisoned by mercury, it is not just an environmental disaster; it is an attack on collective memory, culture, and spiritual strength.
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Join us to watch the movie here
We invite you to donate to help support this project. All offerings are shared in the spirit of reciprocity, and half of what is received (after covering costs) is directed to Indigenous-led initiatives in the lands where it was filmed.
