The River Between Us

Until around ten years ago, the Mashco Piro people were only known from photographs taken during overflights of Peru’s Manu National Park, one of the most biodiverse rainforests on earth. Then they began to show themselves. They raided settlements in search of machetes, pots and plantains, while missionaries and indigenous pioneers, who saw the Mashco Piro as ‘Nomole’ – brothers – tried to make contact.

After the Mashco Piro murdered two people, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture decided to enter into a dialogue with them in a globally unprecedented project. A team of anthropologists and indigenous people seeks to find out whether the Mashco Piro really want contact, and at the same time inform them that the world on the other side of the river follows different rules and poses an existential threat to them.

BROTHERS ACROSS THE RIVER follows this project over five years, ultimately confronting the question of what it means to be "civilised” and whether a radically different way of life can today remain untouched by the modern world.

Carl Gierstorfer’s film sensitively documents the contradictions that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon face every day and gives a voice to all those involved. Questions surrounding the future of the world’s last isolated peoples leave us asking how we want to shape our own futures in the coming years.