THE GARDEN OF MARIA
WORLD Premiere at DOC NYC 2025
Indigenous Time, Urban Forests, and a Fight for the Future
Maria, the heart of the story, standing between forest and city. Frame from The Garden of Maria. Directed by Jade Rainho.
The Garden of Maria premieres at DOC NYC, one of the most important documentary festivals in the United States, with its first screening in New York City. On the eve of the debut, we connected online with director Jade Rainho to talk about how this film was born on the outskirts of São Paulo, in an indigenous village pressed between forest and highway, and why she believes this story should travel far beyond Brazil.
NEW YORK CITY. Written by Pablo Herrera
From the beginning, Jade is very clear about one thing: she doesn’t see herself just “making films about” indigenous communities. She sees her work as a way of serving them. Before there was a script, there was time spent listening, showing up at protests for land demarcation, and visiting the territory where the film would eventually be shot. In that process she met Maria, an elder whose presence stood out immediately—sharp, grounded, impossible to defeat in conversation, as Jade puts it—and who slowly became the heart of the film.
“I’m not a journalist. If I don’t feel we’re connected, I won’t make a movie. All my films come from a place where my sensibility has something real to bring.”
That trust was not automatic. Jade describes a long, patient process: traveling to the village, staying overnight on the kitchen floor with dogs and noise and everyday life around her, waking up to find herself quietly allowed into an important community meeting. That small moment—being invited to stay one more day, offered a bed by Maria’s daughter—marked a turning point. From there, the relationship grew into something closer to friendship and family, and you can feel that intimacy in the images: the way people move in front of the camera, the way conversations unfold without performance.
The film took years to make, and that time is inside the story. What began as a possible short, then as a portrait of many women leaders, slowly focused itself around Maria. In between, Brazil changed governments, funding was frozen, and the pandemic hit—delaying production and making filming in indigenous territories even more dangerous. Instead of the “external” film Jade originally imagined, full of marches and street protests, the documentary moved inward: into kitchens, prayer houses, family shifts, the construction of a ceremonial space at the center of the village. The script had to bend to reality, and the edit became the place where the true structure of the film finally emerged.
“You’re in the biggest city of South America, and yet there is a forest. These people are protecting what is still there. They are the guardians, and the city keeps compressing them.”
One of the most powerful aspects of The Garden of Maria is its sense of place. The village is technically part of the biggest city in Latin America, with avenues and traffic cutting through the territory, but when you step into the forest you can still hear the birds, the wind, the rituals. Jade was determined to bring that contradiction into the sound design: the discomfort of the city’s noise leaking into the garden, and the relief of the moments when only the forest and the ceremonies speak. Watching the film, you feel the pressure of “development” pushing in, and at the same time the stubborn, quiet resistance of people who refuse to let a small piece of land stop breathing.
For young viewers—especially those who live in big cities and may never have been close to an indigenous territory—this film can crack open a lot of assumptions. Jade talks about how many people still imagine “indigenous” as a cliché: far away in the forest, untouched, frozen in time. In the village we see in the film, people wear everyday clothes, have tattoos, use phones, live at the edge of a metropolis—and are still deeply rooted in their own language, spirituality, and way of understanding the land. The film invites us to rethink what “progress” means, and who pays the price when everything is treated as a resource.
“If we want to keep living on this Earth, we must listen to these people and respect their wisdom. Nature is not separate from us — we are nature.”
The contrast: Indigenous people using technology to amplify their voice. Frame from The Garden of Maria. Directed by Jade Rainho.
Throughout our conversation, Jade returns to the idea that we need to recognize the rights of nature with the same seriousness we recognize human rights. For her, forests and rivers are not empty spaces waiting for projects; they are living bodies that sustain life on Earth, and the people who protect them are holding up more than just their own communities. The Garden of Maria is, in that sense, both a portrait and a warning: if we keep ignoring these voices, we are not only erasing cultures—we are eroding our own chances of a livable future.
At TMN®, we work with young creators who are learning to see media not just as content, but as a tool to understand the world and to stand up for something. The Garden of Maria is exactly that kind of film. It is intimate, political, spiritual, and stubbornly honest. Today it begins its journey at DOC NYC; in the coming days and weeks, we hope it reaches classrooms, collectives, and young filmmakers who are asking themselves what stories they want to tell—and who they are telling them for. A longer version of this conversation, including our full podcast interview with Jade Rainho and producer Julia Bock of Surreal Hotel Arts, will be coming soon.
The full conversation is coming soon on our podcast. Subscribe to receive the notification.
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