The 2022 True Life Fund film is Alex Pritz’s The Territory. The recipient of this year’s Fund is the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous surveillance team.
Through the True Life Fund, True/False acknowledges the risks, sacrifices, and contributions of documentary subjects; the dangerous documentation efforts undertaken by the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous surveillance team are essential to preserving their way of life and Indigenous land in Brazil. This beautiful and compelling film confronts ongoing land grabs and deforestation in the Amazon; indigenous forests are rapidly disappearing at the hands of farmers and government inaction. Director Alex Pritz, who brought The Territory through the True/False Film Fest and Catapult Film Fund’s Rough Cut Retreat in 2021 (then, The Untitled Amazon Project), collaborated with the Uru-eu-wau-wau community to bring the heart of the Amazon into the global consciousness.
“The Territory is an incredibly urgent film, and we are thrilled to be presenting it as the True Life Fund film this year” Ragtag Film Society Artistic Director Chloé Trayner says. “As the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous surveillance team embrace the power of filmmaking and document land grabs and deforestation on their ancestral lands, we are allowed intimate access to their fight for survival.” The Territory made its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and received the prestigious World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Documentary Craft and the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary. National Geographic Documentary Films will announce the film’s release plans at a later date.
The True Life Fund itself comprises thousands of individual gifts from festival attendees, which can be made in person at the screenings or by texting TLF to 53555 between now and April 30. Funds raised will go toward helping the Uru-eu-wau-wau community’s ongoing documentation efforts to preserve indigenous land in the Amazon. For more about the True Life Fund, visit truelifefund.org.
For more information, contact: Stacie Pottinger, RFS Director of Development & Communications: [email protected]