Contextual Information

ALEX PRITZ

Alex Pritz is a documentary filmmaker focused on human’s relationship with the natural world. Recently, Alex directed The Territory, which premiered in the World Cinema competition at Sundance 2022 where it won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Documentary Craft, making it the only film at that year’s festival to win awards from both the jury and the audience. IndieWire described the film as, “Gorgeously and sometimes ingeniously conceived, painting an intimate first-hand portrait of joy, pain, and community, before bursting with rip-roaring intensity as it captures a high-stakes struggle for survival unfolding in the moment.”

Pritz is a co-owner of Documist, and has received grants from the Sundance Institute, IDA Enterprise Fund, Catapult Fund, and Doc Society.

FACTS ABOUT THE AMAZON

The Amazon basin spans at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles), nearly twice the size of India. It is home to Earth’s largest rainforest, as well as the largest river for the volume of its flow and the size of its drainage basin. The rainforest, which covers about 80 percent of the basin, is home to one-fifth of the world’s land species, including many found nowhere else in the world. It is also home to more than 30 million people, including hundreds of indigenous groups and several dozen uncontacted or isolated tribes.

The Amazon rainforest is also an enormous carbon sink: an area that draws down carbon from the atmosphere. It also pumps huge quantities of water into the air through a process called transpiration. Enough moisture rises out of the Amazon to supply vast “flying rivers” and about half of the rain that falls back down on the region.

In spite of its vast size and clear significance to the planet, there is much about the Amazon that remains enigmatic because it is such a complex and challenging place to study. It is just as hard to manage. Surrounded by mountainous plateaus on most sides, much of the basin is remote and difficult to access. It covers about one-third of South America; it spans eight countries and many more state and tribal borders; and it features a mosaic of intersecting and overlapping ecosystems.

But as satellite observations have accumulated over the decades, as computing and cartography techniques have advanced, and as new satellites have been flown, remote sensing scientists have found increasingly sophisticated ways to piece together maps and narratives that better explain the Amazon region. Much of this new data shows that over the past several decades, the Amazon has undergone significant changes, including major losses in forest area, expansion of land usage for farming, and shifts in management practices.

Text Adapted from “Mapping the Amazon”

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146355/reflecting-on-a-tumultuous-amazon-fire-season