The EcoViolence project, the Network for Environmental Humanities and Critical Pathways invite you to a screening and conversation around The Falling Sky (Brazil/Italy, 2024) by Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, at BAK Basecamp.

Based on the book of the same name, co-authored by shaman Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky is an immersive cinematic journey into the Yanomami worldview, centred on the sacred Reahu ritual and the community’s struggle against the encroachment of illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest. The film offers what has been described as a “shamanic critique” of the “people of merchandise”: those who, under racial capitalism, exploit nature for financial gain or benefit from that exploitation, damaging the forest-earth and its spirits.

Within the Projecting Post-Extractivism film series, The Falling Sky plays a key role in bringing non-Western ontologies and Amerindian worldviews into the post-extractivist discussion the programme seeks to open. The film shows how these debates extend beyond “natural resources” to encompass the many ways of being and existents rendered as resources within specific colonial ontologies. Central to its inclusion is how cinema’s own affordances are integral to what is being filmed: the series reflects on the themes and subjects of each work, as well as on cinema itself, its capacities, its formal choices, and the ways it engages with and is touched by the worlds it portrays. The Falling Sky allows those outside the forest to begin encountering the plurality of worlds within the world.

The screening is convened and facilitated by Salomé Lopes Coelho (EcoViolence, Utrecht University) and is followed by a conversation with Carolina Sánchez-Jaegher (Utrecht University).

Attendance is free of charge, but registration is required. Please register here.

This event is part of Moving [Images] Post-Extractivism, a programme by Salomé Lopes Coelho, within the ERC project Ecologies of Violence, in collaboration with the Network for Environmental Humanities and BAK Basecamp, and funded by Critical Pathways.