Film: Epic clash over Amazon is a gripping real-life drama
The bloody confrontation occurred at a remote, scrubby expanse called Devil's Curve, where the Andean foothills meet the Amazon jungle.
The Peruvian documentary "When Two Worlds Collide," which opens in New York on Wednesday and in select U.S. cities and the United Kingdom in September, tells with gripping immediacy the real-life Shakespearean tragedy of the Baguazo, a story that isn't over yet.
The outsized protagonists are indigenous leader Alberto Pizango, who the filmmakers closely shadow, and Alan Garcia, the vainglorious Falstaff of a president whose open contempt for the natives makes it easy for the filmmakers to cast him in a villainous pall.
The film, which won the World Cinema Documentary Prize for Best Debut Feature at Sundance this year among other festival awards, was directed by Heidi Brandenburg and Mathew Orzel, both 35.
Opposition lawmakers in Lima foreshadow disaster after the pro-Garcia majority blocks debate to reconsider legislative decrees the natives reject as usurping their communal lands for oil, gas and timber development.
A first grant and other support from Sundance help but not until 2010 do they secure significant financial backing from the Ford Foundation, they told The Associated Press in a recent Skype interview.
No government officials, meanwhile, have been charged with a crime for ordering police to clear the highway at Devil's Curve.