Flowers of the Earth

"Water lives in our bodies," a Kaiowa poet once said. "It evaporates into the air, becomes a cloud of love, falls as rain, sprouts the buds, blooms the flowers. We are Nature." For the Guarani-Kaiowa of Mato Grosso do Sul, there is no line where the body ends and the land begins. The earth is their skin, the tree their umbilicus, the mountains the bones of a living mother. But for over a century, that mother has been fenced, burned, mined, and poisoned, her children pushed onto slivers of the territory that once held them all. The film listens to the elders who remember the forest before the farmers came, before the native were clear-cut and the living land was carved into square plots of a single endless crop. It walks with the healers, whose prayer is constant as breath, and with the young women leading the Retomada, the return to ancestral land. The Guarani-Kaiowa are a people who refuse to vanish. Their story is a struggle for survival, but more than that: a love between a people and their earth, and a quiet, defiant invitation to the world to reforest not only the land, but the mind.