Amazonas Rosa
A film by Rosana Matecki
Amazonas Rosa moves between the lush beauty of the Amazon rainforest and the urgent denunciation of its destruction. The story follows the pink river dolphin’s struggle to escape extinction and the challenges faced by three Indigenous women who resist patriarchy while fighting to protect their ecosystem.
Synopsis
In the Orinoco and Amazon river basins, Lilian, Gregoria, and Valeria build their lives within a threatened ecosystem. Lilian protects the pink river dolphin and defends the river she has known since childhood. Gregoria transforms the sounds of the rainforest into music and leads a new generation of young musicians in Canaima. Valeria—a healer, midwife, former porter, and musical guide in her community—uses her gifts to heal and care for her people. As a pink river dolphin struggles to survive the threats of mining, fishing, hunting, and deforestation, the three women fight to protect their territories and forge lives beyond machismo, poverty, and devastation. Their stories intertwine with the birth, endangerment, and death of this sacred animal, transforming the film into a poem about the beauty of the Amazon and the urgent need to save it.
Director's Note
I grew up in an oil camp in Venezuela where everything appeared perfect, like a postcard, and it took me years to understand the hidden cost of that idea of progress. My relationship with the Amazon changed with the arrival of my son Tadeo, a Yanomami child whose birth connected my life to the rainforest and its resilience. In Lilian, Gregoria, and Valeria, I find three ways of defending this territory: knowledge of the river, music, and healing. Like Gregoria, Valeria belongs to a generation of young Pemón women who do not want to leave their land, but instead seek new ways to live and act within it. Her story embodies many of the contradictions of the contemporary Amazon. She is a healer and midwife, but she also practices artisanal mining to survive. She preserves Indigenous spiritual knowledge while participating in a community shaped by the Baptist Church. She cares for others while trying to continue her own education. I do not want to idealize these lives, but to approach them in all their complexity and show how these women are transforming their traditions in response to a wounded territory.
Producer's Note
Amazonas Rosa is a creative documentary that interweaves observational scenes of daily life, personal testimonies, ceremonies, journeys, and a dreamlike universe inspired by Amazonian cosmology. The song of the pink river dolphin, Gregoria’s cello, Valeria’s music, and the sounds of the river will create a choral narrative in which the rainforest has a presence, a body, and a voice of its own. The film will accompany its protagonists through their daily work, their struggles, and their relationships with other women in their communities: mothers, grandmothers, farmers, and leaders who preserve the conuco, resolve conflicts, and pass knowledge from one generation to the next. Through this intimate, female perspective, we want to reveal an Amazon that is not merely an endangered landscape, but a living home where women are imagining new forms of resistance, leadership, and possibility.