In May 2016, Brazil’s then president, Dilma Rousseff, officially opened Belo Monte on the River Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon River. To make way for the world’s third largest dam, swaths of rainforest were cleared, fishermen and indigenous communities were displaced and 40,000 people were forcefully relocated. The end game: to generate electricity for multinational aluminium manufacturing companies. In the words of the public prosecutor, “all this goes against the law”.

Countdown on River Xingu V focusses on the penultimate construction phase of this mega dam: the flooding of the land. It reveals how the project came to be and what went on behind the scenes to make it happen. A scandal surrounding Brazil’s oil company Petrobras implicating major Brazilian construction companies and politicians is no small piece of the story.