#AWA TRIBE CREATION STORIES MOVIE#

According to Survival, they are now the world's most threatened tribe, assailed by gunmen, loggers and hostile settler farmers.

The Awá are one of only two nomadic hunter-gathering tribes left in the Amazon.

#AWA TRIBE CREATION STORIES MOVIE#

The 51-year-old, who starred in last year's hit movie The King's Speech, and came to prominence playing Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, delivers an appeal to camera calling on Brazil's minister of justice to send in police to drive out the loggers. In a video to be launched on Wednesday, Firth will ask the Brazilian government to take urgent action to protect the tribe.

This week Survival International will launch a new campaign to highlight the plight of the Awá, backed by Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth. Human rights campaigners say the tribe has reached a tipping point and only immediate action by the Brazilian government to prevent logging can save the tribe. Members of the tribe describe seeing their families wiped out. Hired gunmen – known as pistoleros – are reported to be hunting Awá who have stood in the way of land-grabbers. People are pouring on to the Awá's land, building illegal settlements, running cattle ranches. But it is not just the loss of the trees that has created a situation so serious that it led a Brazilian judge, José Carlos do Vale Madeira, to describe it as 'a real genocide'.

It is a scene played out throughout the Amazon as the authorities struggle to tackle the powerful illegal logging industry. All they could do was video the lorry and add the film to the growing mountain of evidence showing how the Awá – with only 355 surviving members, more than 100 of whom have had no contact with the outside world – are teetering on the edge of extinction. Yet as they travelled through the jungle early this year, the small team from Funai – Brazil's National Indian Foundation – did not dare try to stop the loggers the vehicle was too large and the loggers were almost certainly armed.

Awa tribe creation stories