Join us for the Santa Cruz premiere of SAND’s Flowers of the Earth followed by a Q&A with directors Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo.
Doors open at 6 PM. Film begins at 6:30 PM. This is a rare opportunity to experience the film in community, on a big screen and share a conversation with the film directors.
Click HERE for details and ticket information.Â
Flowers of the Earth – Brazil (Mato Grosso do Sul)
They call themselves Flowers of the Earth. In the red-soil heart of Brazil, the Guarani-Kaiowá fight with prayer, with seed, and with their own blood to return to the mother who bore them: the land itself.
“Water lives in our bodies,” a Kaiowá poet once said. “It evaporates into the air, becomes a cloud of love, falls as rain, sprouts the buds, blooms the flowers. We are Nature.”
For the Guarani-Kaiowá of Mato Grosso do Sul, there is no line where the body ends and the land begins. The earth is their skin, the tree their umbilicus, the mountains the bones of a living mother. But for over a century, that mother has been fenced, burned, mined, and poisoned, her children pushed onto slivers of the territory that once held them all.
The film listens to the elders who remember the forest before the farmers came, before the native were clearcut and the living land was carved into square plots of a single endless crop. It walks with the healers, whose prayer is constant as breath, and with the young women leading the Retomada, the return to ancestral land. The Guarani-Kaiowá are a people who refuse to vanish. Their story is a struggle for survival, but more than that: a love between a people and their earth, and a quiet, defiant invitation to the world to reforest not only the land, but the mind.
Special thanks to our promotional partners:
Center for Spiritual Living, Center for World Networking, Romero Institute, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), SURJ Showing Up for Racial Justice—Santa Cruz County, UCSC American Indian Resource Center, UCSC Community Studies, Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County, KSQD Community Radio, Watsonville Film Festival, and Friends of Juristac