Caatinga Sagrada; The Making of the Documentary Film in Brazil
- Eda Tibet
- Sep 24
- 8 min read
Written By Eda Elif Tibet & Amanda Silvino
Arriving in the Semi-Arid Lands
The Caatinga welcomed us with its quiet resilience. It is a landscape often misunderstood, labeled dry, empty, inhospitable. But as we quickly learned, life here refuses to disappear.
Amanda’s presentation to Regional Institute for Small-Scale Appropriate Agriculture (IRPAA), a local organization deeply rooted in sustaining semi-arid communities, opened a door into this truth. Their message was clear: semi-arid lands are still livable, their people are still here, and they are not alone.
At our small bed and breakfast, warmth and resilience met us in the form of Dona Maria, the owner of our guesthouse in Juzairo, Bahia State. Once a passion fruit farmer, her life was shattered when her husband was murdered beside her. With four young children to care for, she rebuilt her life from scratch, first with a hot dog stand, then slowly, into the welcoming home where we now stayed. Each evening, she surprised us with food, often creative experiments like yakisoba or hearty regional dishes, always served with a spirit that carried both grace and strength.
Landscapes of Loss and Survival
Our camera followed the lake of Sobradinho on the São Francisco River, the largest artificial lake in Latin America, where solar panels float on its surface and windmills carve the horizon. The images seem like the face of a sustainable future. Yet behind them lies the memory of tragedy: many communities drowned by a dam, and more than 72000 persons were expelled from their homes. Many who lived there could not believe the flood was real until it swept them away. Songs still recall that day, keeping the memory alive even as the waters cover the land, even after 50 years of the dam's construction.
Renewable energy, we discovered, comes at complex costs. Wind farms now crown the mountain ridges where jaguars once roamed freely. Displaced by the turbines, they have moved into the valley, where traditional communities have long raised goats in communal systems and let them graze among the shrubs. Their herds in traditional territories now fall prey to jaguars, ironically in the valley areas once most widely used, which have since been turned into an environmental protection reserve. Once again, both human and animal lives find themselves under threat, each bearing the burden of so-called green progress.
But the economic benefits of the so-called progress do not return to the region: the roads remain unpaved and full of potholes, the communities still lack sanitation and have only precarious access to drinking water, there are no landfills, and waste multiplies with the expansion of modernity.
On the ground, stories echoed this tension. Some communities received compensation from wind energy companies and invested it in Maracujás (passion fruit fields), turning disruption into renewal.
Others received nothing, left in uncertainty even about whether their water was still safe to drink. Alongside them, we walked to sacred dried springs, filmed ancient caves filled with prehistoric rock art, and stood before a rare 'pregnant tree,' its shape perhaps molded by nature’s own response, refusing to succumb to human interference.
On the mountaintops, the wind farms; in the valleys, the communities.
Even in these fragile and threatened places, community members carried dreams of eco-hotels, land protection, and new forms of resilience.
Between Cities, Between Worlds
The river divides more than land; it separates two worlds. Crossing by boat from Juazeiro to Petrolina, we moved from a landscape of diversity, street dancers, capoeira circles, and children swimming in the river, to one where joggers traced the riverbanks and restaurants pulsed with upscale rhythms. The São João festival filled the nights with music and fireworks until dawn. Yet beneath a bridge between the two cities, we stopped to listen: an orchestra of frogs and insects filled the darkness, a reminder of the Caatinga’s quieter pulse of life.
Community Testimonies
A week later, far from the cities, we visited six communities. Not door to door, but in open circles: on terraces where the wind helps us think, in association halls where collective decisions find their place, in the yard of Cacica Maria in the Atikum Indigenous Territory, beneath the shade that holds the conversation and allows the future to sit with us. From each gathering, we left with pockets full of words, hearts awakened by urgencies, and a map of ways forward drawn by many hands.
In São João, Sobradinho, we heard the wound of misinformation. We want to know what is decided about us, they said. Minutes, records, deadlines, and commitments need to open like windows. There, hope has the name of transparency: access to ICMBio meeting minutes and predictability of deadlines, so that public time speaks clearly with community time.
In Brejo da Brásida, Sento Sé, the hunger of the territory is spelled in the roçado. Cassava wants to become tapioca and income, but the road is rough, water is scarce, and policies arrive slowly. The anguish is the long path between what we know how to plant and what we manage to harvest. The requested way forward is direct and feasible: fair financing, present and reliable technical assistance (ATER), maintained roads, water reaching the beds, agroforestry systems coming to life, and food-purchase programs opening markets and futures.
In Lages, joined by representatives from the communities of Fartura and Limoeiro da Batateira, testimonies were shared about the pain that lies between the desire to build and the walls of no. People were prevented from raising walls, and even the church collapsed due to a lack of authorization from the Boqueirão da Onça National Park management. The anguish is prohibition without dialogue and answers that never come. The proposed path combines accessible credit and transparent authorizations, with open dialogue between banks and environmental management, so that houses and community spaces cease to be a promise and become solid ground under shared governance.
In Queixo Dantas, the silence is heavy. Access to knowledge about what is being decided for the territory is missing, they confess. Not the knowledge of the fields, which flourish, but the routes, the rights, the paperwork. The remedy is born in the meeting itself: founding a cooperative, joining hands, weaving a network, and turning doubt into a collective voice. When a whisper becomes a chorus, the way appears.
Together with representatives from the communities of Andorinhas, Pascoal, Aldeia, and Limoeiro, a written name is missing. We are Fundo and Fecho de Pasto, quilombola and riverside peoples, they said, and this needs to be recorded. Without recognition, the tractor sees no people, only land. The cure begins with what is simple and decisive: recognizing traditionality and consolidating legal identity, so that every license first listens to the community.
In the Atikum Indigenous Community, the rhythm of the day depends on the bucket. Water comes when it can and fails when it is most needed. The water truck is late, the city hall falls short, and the vegetable garden is waiting. Hope takes the form of household cisterns, followed by the dream of pumping from the São Francisco River. With water secured, the pesticide-free garden can flourish, the animals can be fed, and life can breathe. The right partners must arrive, CODEVASF and public funds that turn into works, so that rain is not the only promise.
They were six and could have been sixty, because each community is a star in the same sky. The pressing needs we sketched in our notebook draw a map of priorities: information that does not arrive, roads that do not welcome, water that is not enough, credit that does not reach, rights without recognition, and knowledge that is missing. The solutions we dreamed together fit into our hands when they intertwine: transparency with clear deadlines, rural technical assistance and financing, roads and water, a cooperative and articulation, territorial recognition, and living dialogue with institutions.
We continue in the first person plural. The “we” that writes is the same “we” that opens the association hall, sets the chairs on the terrace, sweeps the Chief’s yard, calls the meeting, drafts the proposal, follows the paperwork, plants the seedling, and waits for the harvest.
Six communities taught us once again that when the territory speaks, the future gains a face. This is how we want to walk: with open words, guaranteed water, the community house standing, the road alive, the fields diverse, and the name recognized where it needs to be.
Voices and Dances of the Sacred
The Caatinga holds an unheard, unseen, and unfelt dimension that many Western scientists rarely recognize, yet it is safeguarded by Afro-Indigenous traditions: the energies of the earth, plants, water, animals, and ancestors. The most powerful voice we encountered was that of Dona Maria, Known as Maria Ponga, not only our host but also the Cacica of the Atikum Indigenous village in Sento Sé.
Her leadership is recognized through lineage, and her grandson will inherit the role. She spoke of her people’s long struggle: homes burned, lives threatened, land stolen. Yet they never ceased their fight to reclaim what was theirs.
Her words carried a profound clarity:
“Earth is our mother, and every being here is sacred. A child of Jurema can never harm people, nor the world. Windf arms bring destruction; they disturb the balance, and they endanger the jaguars.”
She once saw a black jaguar, she told us, her eyes shining with reverence: “It was so beautiful.”
That night, around their sacred hut, songs of Jurema rose into the sky. They sang of mercy, of land, of endurance against those who seek to take the little that remains. Even the cacti around us seemed to glow, their strange and stunning shapes carrying the weight of both survival and prayer.
At another moment, a leap turned into a visitation: our interviewee was taken by a beautiful spirit of dance, ancestors shimmering through the steps before the cameras, as if to remind a less sensitive social order that we are here. Our interlocutor blushed at first. In a sincere conversation, when we opened our hearts to embrace what had happened, she felt at ease and told us about her roots, her dreams, and how she expresses the science of the ancestors through art. Then she showed us her drawings, songs, and poems, kept in a notebook that records the many ancestral traditions she connects with in that territory.
Resisting the Wind
As we left Bahia, we carried not only footage for a film but also stories etched into us of Cacica Maria’s resilience, of rivers dividing worlds, of jaguars, and communities impacted by the very projects meant to save the planet.
The Caatinga is fragile, yet fiercely alive. Its people sing to the sacred tree, resist the destruction of turbines, and remind us that life in the semi-arid is possible. In their songs, their food, their laughter, and their grief, we found both sorrow and strength.
This is the story of the Caatinga Sagrada resisting the wind, holding onto life.
Disclaimer: Caatinga Sagrada is the title of our new documentary film, currently in production and scheduled for release in 2025, as part of the Bridging Values Project's impact and scientific outreach goals. We embarked on this exciting journey between 28 June-12 July. All photographs are courtesy of Eda Elif Tibet unless otherwise stated. We thank all the communities for granting us access to their valuable lands and for sharing their time with us.
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