About the show

The Amazon is a complex, shifting environment. The deforestation ruthlessly driven by the profits of logging and soya bean plantations has seen one fifth of Amazon destroyed already. The lands of the indigenous tribes are disappearing and their traditional way of life is sorely threatened.

Travelling over 10,000km, by foot, light aircraft and boat, Bruce Parry travels to stay with these tribes that live silently beneath the rainforest canopy. Immersing himself in their lives, he reveals how they are affected by the changing world around them.

This series is also the story of the people who live and work there too: the soya farmers, the cattle barons, the loggers and the illegal miners stripping the jungle for traces of gold; the environmental campaigners dying to save the forest, the bio-prospectors and scientists searching for new medicines.

But the simplicities of right and wrong are no longer so true; indigenous people are good and loggers are bad. All too often the man with the chainsaw is poorer than the tribesman and all are being thrown off their land by faceless multi-national agricultural conglomerates. A contemporary portrait of the Amazon Rainforest, river, its landscape and its people, Amazon captures the living reality, the contradictions and ambiguities of this globally-important region.