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.

Written and directed by Carl Gierstorfer

Editor & Title Design Marcel Ozan Riedel bfs
Composer Sam Slater
1st Assistant Director Carmel Fuhg

Director of Photography & Drone Operator Carl Gierstorfer
Additional Camera Michael Reichert Jorge Morales Avendaño
Sound Recordist Carmel Fuhg

Sound Design & Mix Sascha Bercik, Nico Berthold
Grading Marko Plötner, Juan Galva
Production Assistants Daniela Bollmann, Izzy Hughes-Morgan

Head of Production Ko Miklik
Consulting Producer Cynthia Kane
Executive Producer First Hand Films Esther van Messel
Executive Producer DOCDAYS Antje Boehmert
Commissioning Editors SWR Gudrun Hanke El-Ghomri, Bernd Seidl

Produced by DOCDAYS Productions in co-production with SWR in association with arte

Fiilm Funding by
Hessenfilm & Medien
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

World Sales FIRST HAND FILMS

Length: 88:30 Min
Completed: 2022