Interview with a reforestation champion for a French documentary feature film

A perfect fit for this ambitious film co-produced by ARTE France - GALAXIE - Le Cinquième Revê, with the participation of USHUAïA TV, written by Cyril Dion, Thierry Robert and Valerie Rosselini, and directed by Thierry Robert. For Story Productions, the mission consisted of organizing a shooting in autonomy to capture a conversation with Eduardo Malta at the Fazenda Santa Maria do Monjolinho, a wonderful coffee farm built during the second half of the 19th century, right in the middle of the state of São Paulo. Recruiting a multipotent technical team, gathering the authorizations for the shooting, performing the interview - as well as filming some high-end drone images, at Story Productions we were delighted to contribute to this visionary project, a story of resilience and hope for the future in a very troubled world.

Eduardo Malta spent years in Amazonas, first trying to fight the deforestation by creating some trees' nurseries, until he was inspired by the indigenous knowhows about how to regenerate their environment and invented Muvuca, a seeding technique which enables to recreate very dense long-term forestal growth. The idea is simple : for millenaries, the indigenous people have been planting new trees directly on ground, and well, it perfectly worked!

In this reservoir of natural and ethnical diversity that lays around the Xingu river, in Mato Grosso, the deforestation resulting from mining and agriculture has an important impact on the quality of the water, endangering the way of life and the culture of the indigenous people.

Eduardo Malta gathered a network of indigenous families commissioned to collect a great number of different types of seeds. Muvuca is a mixture of various trees' seeds and green manure with sand, and the planting is systematized and mechanized, using the local soybean and corn planters' machines. Compared to a classical trees' nursery strategy, the Muvuca process proves to be super efficient for a cost being divided by 2, and the workforce needed by approximately 10, explains Eduardo Malta. And once planted, the new forest happens to be so dense that there is no space even for the weeds!