'Amazon of America': short film imagines a post-coup Brazil selling the rainforest to the U.S.

Vitória Régia is a 21‑minute short with a simple, chilling premise: imagine the 2025 Brazil where a rightwing coup worked, democracy was crushed, and the Amazon was handed over like an acquisition target. The film leans into bleak satire—propaganda tours, a carved Statue of Liberty in the jungle and a thick‑accented soldier cheerfully declaring, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America.”

On screen, a fictional oil boss named Harold Goldman, of a company called Amazon X, frames the rainforest handover as a historic partnership. In the film, Brazilian reporters are suddenly treated like foreign visitors—needing visas to enter their own backyard—while communications are cut, a news blackout descends and Indigenous leaders vanish from public view.

This dystopia is fiction, and it’s terrifyingly specific. In real life the 2022‑23 coup attempt failed, its participants were tried and jailed, and Brazil’s institutions held—just. The short exists to show how close the country came to something worse, and how easy it would be to trade sovereignty for short‑term control of resources.

The film was shot in March 2025 with collaboration from Indigenous networks Coiab and Apib and features actors including Alice Braga and Indigenous performer Ywyzar Tentehar. Director Denis Kamioka (known as Cisma) said the project kept bumping into reality—shot months before an unrelated high‑profile international incident, he found himself competing with headlines as geopolitics kept catching up to the fiction.

Vitória Régia does more than wallow in doom. It’s designed to be a wake‑up call that pairs pop aesthetics and a stirring soundtrack with the blunt facts about what’s at stake: Indigenous land, environmental collapse and the erosion of democracy. Creators say Indigenous resistance is at the heart of the story—people who’ve stewarded the forest for centuries and are often the first defense against extractive land grabs.

The short lands in a tense present: Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019–23 policies coincided with surging deforestation and incursions into Indigenous lands, and his son Flávio is poised to challenge Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva this year. There are also reports accusing Flávio Bolsonaro of offering U.S. access to Brazil’s rare‑earth reserves — a reminder that resource geopolitics and technology (from oil to minerals) can be sold as solutions while creating fresh political and environmental headaches.

If Vitória Régia has a single comic‑bitter punchline, it’s this: when politics and corporations promise a fast tech or resource fix, check the fine print—sovereignty, communities and the climate are often “not included.” It’s a short film, but the alarm it sets is loud enough to make you want to read the small print on the future.