Yanuni Is a Thunderclap in the Rainforest — And Juma Xipaia Is Its Lightning

Yanuni is a vital, volcanic documentary — a cinematic reckoning with colonial legacies, environmental warfare, and the quiet, blazing power of one woman’s refusal to be silenced. Don’t just watch it. Listen.

Reviewed @ouchmagazine/RM

There are documentaries that rattle the mind — and then there are films like Yanuni, which slip beneath the skin like a jungle fever dream and awaken something ancestral in the bones.

From the minds of director Richard Ladkani (The Ivory Game) and producer Leonardo DiCaprio (cinema’s most committed eco-evangelist), Yanuni is no mere documentary — it’s a spiritual dispatch from the lungs of the Earth, a cinematic blood oath to Indigenous resistance, and a love letter to a woman who speaks not only for her people, but for a planet on fire.

Her name is Juma Xipaia — remember it, repeat it, revere it. In a grainy 2009 news clip, she is impossibly young, standing on Amazonian soil with the kind of calm that foretells a storm. When asked about her dream for the future, she doesn’t blink: “Fighting for the Indigenous cause. Standing up for my people.” It’s not a sound bite. It’s a prophecy.

Cut to present day: Juma has become the first female chief of the Middle Xingu. She has faced six assassination attempts and stood her ground in the crosshairs of multinational greed, political erasure, and deforestation’s silent death march. Through it all, she emerges not as a victim, but as a vision — part Joan of Arc, part Earth mother, part climate warrior in war paint and soft defiance.

The camera doesn’t gawk — it listens. It follows Juma and her partner, Hugo (a Special Forces ranger with the soul of a poet), through moments both monumental and mundane. We see them in protest, in hiding, in joy. We witness the fragility of their safety and the ferocity of their hope. And when Juma becomes pregnant, the film takes on an even deeper urgency: this isn’t just a fight for territory — it’s a fight for legacy.

Visually, Yanuni is lush and lyrical, like Terrence Malick wandered into the rainforest with a sharper sense of danger. Every frame pulses with breath — the breath of trees, of ancestors, of Juma herself. But don’t mistake its beauty for softness. This is not a tranquil tale. It’s a pulse-pounding, spine-prickling confrontation with the systems that devour people like Juma in the name of "progress."

There are no white saviors here, no Western talking heads to translate her pain. Instead, Yanuni hands the microphone — and the machete — directly to Juma. She doesn’t ask to be understood. She dares you to witness.In the age of performative allyship and greenwashed media, Yanuni is the real thing: blistering, intimate, alive. It doesn’t just document a movement — it moves you. Like the best couture, it is hand-stitched, rare, and made to last.

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