Amazonie, les civilisations oubliées de la forêt

"Amazonie, les civilisations oubliées de la forêt" (2022) is a French documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Marie Thiry and Marc Jampolsky, it sets out to recover what the Amazon basin looked like before European contact — a landscape that housed an estimated eight to ten million people in 1492, a population all but erased within decades by diseases brought from the Old World.

The thread running through the film is ceramic evidence: pre-Columbian funerary urns, densely decorated with human and animal forms, that archaeologists have been assembling for years. The stylistic range across hundreds of sites points to hundreds of distinct cultures, each sharing a defining trait — the animals they depicted carried human qualities, a hallmark of animist belief systems that shaped daily life across the entire basin.

If you picture the Amazon as empty jungle, this film argues the opposite. Stream "Amazonie" (2022) online on iFILM.