Alice Pataxó & The Call of the Sea
The Call of the Sea is a short documentary born from a process of listening.
It is not a film about the ocean as landscape, but about the ocean as memory, territory and living presence.
The film follows Alice Pataxó, a young Indigenous communicator from the Pataxó people in Brazil, as she returns to the sea after years of distance. For her community, the ocean carries a complex and contradictory meaning. It was across these waters that the Portuguese first arrived, marking the beginning of colonization and a historical rupture that still moves through generations. Because of this, the sea has long been associated with fear and silence. At the same time, it remains a place of food, spirituality, balance and ancestral knowledge.
The film unfolds as an intimate journey of reconnection. There is no explanatory narration, no attempt to translate the experience into concepts. Through long takes, natural sound and the presence of the body in the landscape, the film creates a space where time slows down and where the encounter between Alice and the ocean can be felt from within.
More than a personal story, this return to the sea reveals a wider reflection on the relationship between environmental justice and historical memory. In many parts of the world, conservation has been told as if nature existed separately from people. The Call of the Sea proposes the opposite. It understands the ocean as a cultural and spiritual territory, inseparable from the lives and knowledge of those who have always lived in relation to it.
The film was created through a collaborative process. The text and voice belong to Alice. The cinematic language emerges from the encounter between our gazes and from the time we shared in the territory. This approach is central to the project. The film does not speak about an Indigenous experience. It is built with it.
Its premiere took place during COP30 in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, in a moment that transformed the film’s meaning. One day before the screening, Alice’s Indigenous land was officially demarcated after more than thirty years of struggle. The film became part of a living process of historical repair, turning the screening into a collective act of celebration, resistance and future.
Created independently with a small crew and with partial cost support from Parley for the Oceans, this short film is the first movement of a larger cinematic project currently in development. The next stage will deepen the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the ocean, expanding the film into a broader reflection on territory, healing and the possibility of imagining new futures from ancestral knowledge.
At its core, The Call of the Sea is a film about reconnection.
A reconnection between body and landscape.
Between history and present.
Between conservation and cultural survival.
It is an invitation to listen to the ocean again, not as a distant horizon, but as a voice that continues to shape who we are.
