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‘The Falling Sky’ Review: The Yanomami People Deliver an Apocalyptic Warning in Scorching Resistance Doc

Entrancing at times and eventually hard-hitting, Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha’s 'The Falling Sky' amplifies voices of Indigenous people.

For about the first hour of their documentary “ The Falling Sky,” Brazilian directors Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha introduce us to the traditions and ongoing plight of the Yanomami Indigenous people — namely, fending off invaders — without making their presence known. Instead, Rocha and Carneiro da Cunha’s entrancing must-see pronouncement of a film serves as a portal for the Yanomami to communicate with the “merchandise people,” as they describe all of us existing in a capitalist system that disregards nature for financial gain. One of the most necessary and scorching pieces of nonfiction storytelling in recent memory, “The Falling Sky” offers no comfort and points fingers with a ferocious righteousness as we stare into the abyss of the inescapable environmental catastrophe so-called “developed nations” have wrought.

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