A gripping performance by Raul Julia (Kiss of the Spiderwoman, The Addams Family) forms the centre of this biopic of Chico Mendes, who, in the Eighties, led the Amazonian peasants campaigning to save the Brazilian rainforest and their homes. Director John Frankenheimer has created a fine TV movie which captures superbly the damply sweltering forest atmosphere and the lives of the peasants laboriously producing rubber by old-fashioned methods. It was thanks to Mendes that the forest people organised themselves into a movement. But he died for their cause (in 1990), even though the Brazilian government eventually agreed to protect certain areas of the forest. Sonia Braga (who also starred in Kiss of the Spiderwoman) has a small role as a sympathetic environmentalist in this fine homage to unassuming heroism.

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