Nov 17, 2010
Source: Monsters and Critics.com
Los Angeles - Director James Cameron is stepping up his battle to save indigenous communities threatened by construction of huge dams in the Amazon rain forest, in a move he says has strong parallels to his record-breaking movie Avatar.
Cameron this week released a short movie called A Message from Pandora, which spotlights the battle waged by tribes in the Amazon against a Brazilian project to build the world's third-largest hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River. The movie is available as a special feature on the Avatar Collector's Edition DVD.
The 17-billion-dollar Belo Monte dam would divert almost the entire flow of the river along a 100-kilometre stretch, with its reservoirs flooding more than 40,000 hectares of rainforest and displacing more than 40,000 people, according to the environmental group Amazon Watch.
'I hope Avatar fans will watch A Message from Pandora and join me in this critical fight,' Cameron said in a statement.
The filmmaker said he originally envisaged the world's most commercially successful movie as an advocacy statement to help stop the decimation of the world's natural resources. 'I ended up going to Brazil, and all of a sudden I was living in Avatar,' he said.