The pilot episode of the series opens with beautiful drone shots of the Manu National Park in the Peru. Recent view of the renowned tropical Andes and the Amazon Basin shows the vast isolated watershed.  Amid the Manu River, the focus narrows the main character, accompanied by her adult guide, making their way through the Incan and Pre-Incan ruins and petroglyphs, we see the long history of indigenous occupations.

Our main character, Rafaela Moura passes by a sign of the local legend Paititi, then a group of semi-nomadic looking men searching for a child; she stops to talk to the inhabitants — and her dialect is not recognizable.  

We see breathtaking images of how Peru’s national protected areas agency SERNANP under the Ministry of the Environment distinguished various zones some restricted zones where conservation is needed.  Rafaela interviews a Peruvian expert on the amazon stating that climate change has devastated the rainforest and that programs reveal implementation and funding gaps even in the best of circumstances. 

The inhabitants seem hopeful with the Camisea Gas Field and exploration near the Andes but fears that it may impact the area negatively. Rafaela is overcome with emotion as she revisits a familiar tribal village where we sees exquisite art, music and pottery.

The program then drops back to set the scene for what drove these tribes from their homes in the rainforest to a work construction site. The communities interact with the strangers naively: Rafaela looking out at the gas field starts to have flashbacks of Rafaela’s family working on this site’s largest dam in the world. Her childhood come back to her. Rafaela looks out at the view and tells us how it feels for her to be back home after so many years. She tells us that she wishes that the places that she loved as a kid, the rainforest was her backyard, but it is no longer the same. Due to climate change, and the government’s industrialization efforts, they now are a shell of what they used to be. 

Rafaela starts, in the village by interviewing a local leader. The two discuss the climate change and the genocide crisis that’s facing the BIPOC indigenous population of Peru. The local leader gives half-hearted and canned answers, which leads Rafaela to dig deeper, to find the truth. 

Rafaela journeying into the dangerous depths of the Peruvian Amazon. She begins discovering atrocities after atrocities, several hundred every month, well in excess of normal quotas, and clearly in violation of human rights and Federal rules. Eventually, she gets stripped of her Brazilian citizenship privileges and forcefully removed from her location. She was shamed by her policeman and regulatory superiors as well as some of her peers for her actions (which may be why she waited 35 years of her entire life to go back to the Village).  

The Amazon. Verite of Rafaela with the villagers, enjoying their unique culture. As Rafaela’s voiceover tells us how special, and unique these communities are. Set against the TransAmazonian Highway, and the trauma it brought with its construction. We hear Rafaela’s hopes for the future and her most important takeaways. Being that the history of the Amazon to Latin America is a metaphor for how we are failing the Amazon, becoming a cycle that we can’t break.