EXCLUSIVE: Fisher Stevens’ Amazon Rainforest Doc We Are Guardians will launch on several platforms on April 22, which, appropriately, is Earth Day.

We Are Guardians counts Leonardo DiCaprio among its exec producers, alongside Jennifer Davisson and Phillip Watson from Appian Way. The feature doc follows Indigenous forest defenders protecting the Brazilian Amazon.

Starting on Earth Day, it will stream on AVOD service Tubi in English-speaking countries, including the U.S. and Canada, the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand. It will also be available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, Google Play and Vimeo on Demand. It’s a serious boost to the availability of the film, which is already streaming on Netflix across Latin America and Prime Video in the UK and Germany.

The film recounts the struggle of local communities to protect a fragile and vital ecosystem that also serves as their ancestral home. It follows indigenous forest guardian Marçal Guajajara and Indigenous leader Puyr Tembé who are on the frontline of the fight, risking their lives to fight deforestation. It also reveals another side to the issue, showing the struggle of Valdir, an illegal logger, who is in a poverty trap and sees no other way to feed his family than continuing to cut down the forest.

Directed by Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman, We Are Guardians premiered at the Hot Docs Festival. It had a limited theatrical run in North America. There have been special screenings around the world, including at the Brazilian Congress, United Nations Headquarters in New York, and at COP30. 

Co-Director Guajajara, who is also a Guajajara tribal member, said: “People ask why they should care about a forest in Brazil when they live in Oregon or California or New York. Here is the answer: the Amazon generates 20 billion metric tons of water vapor every single day. That moisture becomes rainfall. That rainfall becomes crops. Those crops become food on your table.

“The companies that are destroying the Amazon, such as JBS and Cargill, are also the companies that influence the price of the food you buy. This is not a distant environmental problem. This is your grocery bill. This is your drought. This is your future.”

Fellow directors Green and Grobman added: “We made this film to show what it looks like when communities refuse to back down against the most powerful corporations and governments on Earth — and win.”

Fisher Stevens is known for his on-screen work as an actor with credits including the Short Circuit films. He also won an Oscar for dolphin-hunting film The Cove, on which he was a producer. We Are Guardians was produced by Stevens with Zak Kilberg and Maura Anderson from the Highly Flammable label alongside filmmaker Chelsea Greene of One Forest.