In the jungle, the mighty jungle (From Halesowen News)

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

7:00am Saturday 22nd November 2008

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Amazonas Film Fest: A film festival dedicated entirely to environmental documentaries to raise awareness of deforestation and climate change? Our eco correspondent travels 18,000km and spends two tonnes of CO2 in order to find out how the Amazonas Film Festival plans to save the world, plus talks to actors, directors and environmentalists in Manaus, Brazil.

By Kate Hodal, PA Features Perhaps it's the woozy effect of the malaria pills - or the stifling, 38C heat at 10am mingled with a warm morning beer - but Alan Parker and I have found no better topic of discussion as our boat plunges into the Amazon rainforest than how - and how not - to have sex in public toilets.

Thankfully, our audience - a group of bikini-clad and caipirinha-drinking men and women passed out in hammocks - is blissfully unaware of the conversation around them.

The blue and white double-decker Mississippi-inspired showboat carrying them, me and the 64-year-old director of Evita and Angela's Ashes up the muddy-gold Rio Negro is taking us to a hotel suspended from trees a few hours deep into the Amazonian jungle.

And it just can't go fast enough.

Thanks to the Amazonas Film Festival, possibly the weirdest and yet most charming festival film has ever seen, we've abandoned the crumbling French-colonial edifices and corrugated-iron shantytowns of Manaus - a sprawling, sweaty and nearly treeless city of 1.5 million people and endless potholed motorways - for a taste of life in a region that holds 50% of the whole world's biodiversity and is facing fast extinction.

Manaus is both the capital of Brazil's largest state - Amazonas - and the last major port of call before heading into the wilds of the rainforest.

For the last five years it's been the locale for a film festival dedicated to screening movies on adventure, nature and the environment, ideologically serving to remind us that our world resources are finite, and that we best look after them while we still can.

With judges like Party Of Five's Neve Campbell, wildlife documentary maker Michael Rosenberg and queen of American indie cinema Parker Posey all involved, it's also quite possibly the only festival where everyone is both relaxed and intoxicated enough to talk about anything - including climate change or the fact that we're simultaneously helping to destroy the environment while trying to save it.

Eighteen thousand kilometres and two tonnes of CO2 got me down to Manaus, where after 40 miles of chugging upriver pink dolphins, manatees, howler monkeys, scarlet macaws and some of the most beautiful rainforest Earth has ever seen become the only view around. It's the only state to have actually outlawed deforestation and installed tough environmental protection measures (manned by an actual 'Climate Police'), and yet the capital's decrepit streets are littered with rubbish and nowhere, not even our poshly named five-star Hotel Tropical, seems to care about recycling.

But it's through films like Marco Bechis' Birdwatchers, an understated but powerful Brazilian tale about Indians who struggle for survival after their land is taken over by white soya farmers, and Canadian Ian Connacher's telling documentary about plastic, its many uses and its multiple dangers (Addicted To Plastic), that the festival hopes to instigate some change.

All films shown are free of charge and involve tales of environmental hope, destruction or quandary - and most of them are screened at the riotously pink Teatro Amazonas, Manaus' vestigial legacy of a 19th century richesse that disappeared along with the rubber trade and now sits confusedly in the middle of a town whose main industry involves the production of electronics.

While showing eco films in one tropical city over a six-day period might not seem like it's making much of a difference worldwide, Lionel Chouchan, one of the founders of the festival, is convinced that the films - and hence the festival - succeed at doing just that.

"Images - be they through TV, the internet or film - are helping to raise awareness about the defining challenge of our time," he tells me on our return from the rainforest, where we've been to swim with dolphins, walk in the rainforest and learn about medicinal plants.

"And that challenge is global warming."

But Mississippi Burning director Alan Parker is a bit more wary of the effect of film on the general population.

"Films don't change the world - they create debate," he says.

"At the end of the day, whether we're in Cannes or the Amazon, this is a film festival, not a world conference on the future of the planet."

While it should be noted that nearly every journalist, director, producer and documentary maker was flown into Manaus to take part in the festival - thereby emitting a huge amount of CO2 - Roberio Braga, Secretary of Culture, is quick to point out that the emissions are offset through the Brazilian Enterprise for Research on Farming and Cattle Raising (Embrapa).

"There are lots of film festivals in Brazil and not a single one of them has taken the same precaution," he says.

"But we have to fly people into Manaus, not least because the festival is in the middle of the rainforest."

Yes, we might be knocking back rum and Cokes and yes, Coca Cola might be sponsoring the festival, but - in a way - at least such a festival exists: without it, I wouldn't have had the chance to learn quite a few things, many of them pertaining to the Amazon itself.

One of the stars of Bechis' film Birdwatchers, Eliane Juca da Silva, tells me that the situation in her native tribe, the Guarani, is plagued by suicide, drugs and high unemployment rates - all vestiges of an apartheid stoked first by slavery and then by a Brazilian move to relegate indigenous land rights to reservations.

"Our forests have been destroyed to make way for sugar plantations, so we can't hunt or live the way we used to," she says, a bright red and blue parrot feather dangling from her right ear.

"We have high suicide rates, drug use, land wars with the whites.

"You laugh, but we do dress up as 'Indians' and go down to the river to scare the tourists and have them take pictures of us to earn some money - just like you see in the film - because it's hard to exist on the reservation and it's a way of surviving."

But the focus isn't just on Brazil: nuclear testing on Bikini island, the environmental costs of war worldwide, and water problems in India have also all made it onto the documentary list this year - with the winning documentary films being Connacher's Addicted To Plastic and Robert Nugent´s look at Guinean gold mining in End Of The Rainbow.

Will these winning films help to reverse climate change and alter the world's behaviour overnight? Almost certainly not. But hopefully what they will do is get people thinking, even if that means becoming more aware of the massive task ahead of them.

"I came to Manaus 20 years ago to shoot a documentary about the Amazon and I don't recognise the city at all now," says Michael Rosenberg, a natural history documentary maker for the BBC and National Geographic and president of this year's documentary jury.

"Not only that but I don't recognise any of the rainforest around it. The rate of change here is absolutely terrifying. Amazonas State might have banned deforestation, but the Amazon isn't just in Amazonas - it's all over Brazil."

I have yet to verify it, but I heard that the wood that comprises the four miles of rainforest catwalks that surrounded our treetop hotel all came from the 17% part of the Amazon that's already been deforested.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't care how many eco film festivals I go to: that just doesn't sit right.

Maybe this is what Alan Parker meant when he said festivals don't change things - they instigate a debate.

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