Documentary - AMAZANGA KAUSAI
- Director: Nicola Peel & James Ficklin
- Year: 2005
- Country: USA/Ecuador
- Duration: 28min
- Genre: Short Documentary
- Language: Spanish w/ English subtitles
Trying to hold onto their ancient lands, the Amazanga Indian Community in the upper Amazon share their extensive knowledge of medicinal plants and their cosmological vision, despite their struggle against mining companies. This film is a first hand perspective of their story.
Tuesday 27th February, Seymour Centre, 3.00 pm
The Festival supporting the Amazanga Indian Community
Amazanga Kausai was produced to help the Amazaga community of southern Ecuador buy back their ancestral homeland. A journey to their sacred lake, the wisdom of the medicinal and edible plants and their connection to the ‘cosmovision’. They are urgently trying to buy back their land to protect it from the rapid destruction by the oil, gold and timber companies.
The Sydney Latin American Film Festival is donating a quarter of the proceeds from the Festival ticket sales toward the Land Conservation Project
Amazanga Kausai and the Land Conservation Project
Protecting rainforests through land acquisition is a fundamental of botanical and cultural conservation. National parks are useful in protecting areas of rich biodiversity, but they can better serve the cultural and natural needs of an area if buffer zones are created around them where local peoples can thrive in an interdependent relationship with the ecology.
This land purchase is part of an urgent program to buy up remaining parcels in the area in order to create a buffer zone around bordering Sangay National Park thus protecting the Amazon and the people who live there.
If you are interested in helping to save the Amazon please consider donating to land purchases. For more information see
www.rainforest.org/projects/llushin/llushin.html
www.osanimi.org
The Next Project
The filmmakers of Amazanga Kausai are now busy editing Blood of the Amazon. This shows a concise overview of what is happening to the Ecuadorian Amazon in relation to the petroleum industry. At present there is a fascinating case whereby 30,000 Ecuadorian people are suing Chevron Texaco for the worst environmental damage the world has ever seen. It is being compared to Chernobyl in its devastation.
Texaco (now Chevron) created what experts believe is the worst oil-related disaster on the planet in Ecuador’s rainforest when it operated an oil concession there from 1964 to 1992. During that time, it violated industry practice and Ecuadorian and U.S. law by dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic waste.
Still today the effects are widely seen. Cancer is at an unprecedented high along with a large number of other illnesses related to the contamination. The locals do not have any clean water to drink and are unable to even drink rainwater due to the continual burning of gas.
For more information on this film please see www.bloodoftheamazon.com
We are in urgent need of funds to finish postproduction so if you can help us please be a part of getting this important film out to the world.
