WHY wE MADE THIS DOCUMENTARY FILM
Chocó Rainforest communities are suffering because palm oil plantations are contaminating their rivers, and they do not have access to clean water. The problem that while most people have heard of the Amazon Rainforest, most people don’t know that the Chocó Biogeographic Region exists. The Chocó Biogeographic Region—also including cloud and highland forests—traverses the Pacific Coast of Panama, through Colombia, and into the province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, where Black and Indigenous communities coexist.
One reason for making Together for Water has been to put the Chocó Biogeographic Region on the map. For, how can you help people who live in the place that the rest of the world doesn’t know exists? Together for Water helps introduce people to both the beauty and challenges of the lives of those who live in the Chocó Rainforests.
In 2010, the communities of La Chiquita and Guadalito, joined together to file the FIRST constitutional-level lawsuit in the world against two oil palm companies for polluting their only source of water, their river, and thus violating the Rights of Nature and of the communities Rights to Living Well.
Although the two communities legally won their historical lawsuit granting rights to the river and the forest, to this day, reparations have not been made. Their water continues to be contaminated. People continue to die and become seriously ill.
In 2016, we decided to take action for ourselves, as a collective (the two Chocó communities together with the Roots & Routes community), and spread the word that the Chocó Rainforest and the long-term struggles of the human forest guardians exist!
What did we do? 1) We co-created Roots & Routes IC, our 501c3 non-profit organization. 2) We co-produced this documentary film! Roots & Routes, La Chiquita, and Guadualito, with collaboration from Selvas Producciones, worked on this film from 2016-2024. We did it! We are finally done, and now the documentary is taking off!!
This documentary film is a collective effort to tell our stories, those of the Awá Indigenous people and of the Black peoples of the Chocó Rainforest. It is our story, and also the story of those who are no longer here.
The oil palm companies polluted our way of life. They polluted our water. They polluted our well-being.
We have lost the quality of our food, and now we have to go to the city of San Lorenzo, we have to buy what nature used to provide us. What we really need is our water.
We long for our river and ache with nostalgia. Something has rumbled within, something we had practically forgotten has been reborn, something we had lost.
Camera in hand, this is a diary of plural landscapes, of ancestral ways of knowing and being that have been disrupted. Our ancestors came to these territories in Esmeraldas searching for freedom and settled in this place where we live. Now the companies have arrived to exploit our territories. We demand that the palm oil companies, Los Andes and Palesema, return our clean water and pay for the damages they inflicted on us. We demand justice from the Ecuadorian State, which has forgotten our communities.
The images within the film are the result of an intense work of collective creation, of research and memory. We met to reflect together on the contamination of our water, to create a message that contributes to a more just society—one that’s more empathetic to diverse struggles and is based on storytelling, respect, and the right to a dignified life for all peoples.
We are young people. We are children, we are daughters and sons, we are sisters and brothers. We are Indigenous, and we are Black. We are activists, we are world changers, we are leaders, we are survivors, and we are liberating these rivers. We are liberating ourselves for the life of all beings in the province of Esmeraldas.
But we can’t do it alone. Twenty years so far and still ongoing. We need allies. We need your support. Please join and contribute to our fight for the right to water.