Film Forum

The Rainforest Alliance is an international non-profit organization working in 70 countries to create a more sustainable world. We work to solve some of the most urgent environmental and social challenges of our day, from deforestation and the climate crisis, to entrenched poverty and human rights violations among rural communities.

Neidinha Bandeira has spent over four decades working directly with Indigenous communities to defend their rights and protect their lands. In 1984, she moved back to Uru-eu-wau-wau territory as a ranger for FUNAI, the government agency responsible for protecting the traditions, cultures and rights of Indigenous people. A rush to exploit the rainforest for logging, mining, farming and cattle ranching was underway. While the Uru-eu-wau-wau had been granted sovereignty over 7,000 square miles of their ancestral territory, illegal incursions and attempted land theft were common. Neidinha and the Uru-eu-wau-wau worked together to conduct surveillance and catch invaders, forging an enduring relationship. After exposing corruption inside FUNAI in 1990, Neidinha and her fellow whistleblowers founded the nonprofit Kandidé Ethno-Environmental Defense Association to continue their work with Indigenous populations.

Alex Pritz is a documentary film director and cinematographer focused on human’s relationship with the natural world. Pritz’s directorial debut, THE TERRITORY, premiered in the World Cinema competition at Sundance 2022, winning both an Audience Award and Special Jury Award for Documentary Craft, making it the only film at that year’s festival to win awards from audience and jury alike. Pritz also worked as a cinematographer on the feature documentary THE FIRST WAVE with director Matt Heineman, and as a cinematographer and field producer on Jon Kasbe’s feature documentary WHEN LAMBS BECOME LIONS (Tribeca 2018). Prior to that, Pritz co-directed, shot and edited the documentary short My Dear Kyrgyzstan (Big Sky 2019). He is a co-founder of Documist and has received grants from the Sundance Institute, IDA Enterprise Fund, Catapult Fund and Doc Society. Pritz holds a Bachelor of Science from McGill University, where he studied Environmental Science and Philosophy. In 2012, he received an inaugural Dalai Lama Fellowship for his work developing film curricula alongside low-income communities in the Philippines and taught participatory film workshops for lawyers and human rights advocates around the world.

Michael Gibbons is Lead, Creative Design & Editorial at the Rainforest Alliance, an international nonprofit that works to protect forests, improve the livelihoods of farmers and forest communities, promote human rights, and help mitigate the climate crisis. Previously, he served as Director of Marketing and Communications at Creative Capital, a national nonprofit organization that supports groundbreaking artists of all disciplines. He also worked at Film at Lincoln Center, where as Director of Digital Platforms he oversaw the online growth of the organization, the New York Film Festival, and the award-winning magazine, Film Comment. Before coming to New York in 2011, he worked for many years as a producer at several of Brazil’s leading cultural institutions, including the São Paulo Biennial, Cinemateca Brasileira, and It’s All True International Documentary Film Festival.

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