Sewage in Rio Waters and Other Challenges as Brazil Prepares for Sports Spectacles

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Dallas Ripka, a Pace University communications student, shoots scenes in Rio de Janeiro for a film on the impact of the World Cup and Olympics. Credit Samantha Finch

For the fourth year in a row, a team of graduate and undergraduate communication students at Pace University has created a compelling short documentary focused on efforts to mesh human progress with the environment. (I admit a bias here, given that I co-teach the documentary course that produces these films with Pace Prof. Maria Luskay.)

This year’s film, “Green vs. Gold,” focuses on Brazil’s struggle to manage the social and environmental impacts of preparing for back-to-back international sports spectacles — this year’s World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. The rising tropical powerhouse has greatly expanded its middle class and seen tourism revenue triple since 2000. But enormous challenges persist.

It’s a brisk 20-minute report so I hope you can find time to watch. We saw substantial growing pains, and some hopeful signs, in three places:

• On Ilha Grande — the third busiest island destination for tourists in South America — interviews with business owners and local environmentalists reveal a race between rising popularity, mostly via cruise ships, and the capacity of infrastructure to handle growing crowds.

• The beautifully preserved cobbled lanes and buildings of Paraty, a centuries-old port on the coast between Rio and Sao Paulo, are attracting thousands of visitors. But the city’s antiquated sanitation system is completely overwhelmed. Health and environmental officials say that a growing stream of revenue from offshore oil production is helping finance improvements. But the problems are acute, with feces dotting the canals. Do watch the film, but perhaps not just before supper.

• In Rio de Janeiro, the film describes how a surge of construction and related gentrification is displacing thousands of people living in hillside favelas — informal settlements that are home to 3 million of the city’s 12 million residents. The students also interview Mario Moscatelli, an environmental campaigner focused on the trash and pollution in Rio’s waters.

By coincidence, The Times has just run a fresh news story on Rio’s challenges with water pollution. The accompanying video report, focusing on how the pollution problems threaten plans for the Olympic sailing events, features Moscatelli, as well.

In shooting their film, the Pace students interviewed people with a wide range of views, from representatives of Rio’s Olympics development project to Theresa Williamson of Catalytic Communities, an organization defending the rights of favela dwellers, from Fernando Pedro Louro, the Secretary of Health in Paraty, to Nelson Palma, the leading environmentalist in Ilha Grande.

The great value of this kind of educational experience lies not only in learning by doing (remembering to keep batteries charged, get release forms signed, and the like), but in bringing into focus that murky idea known as sustainable development. Students need not wait until they have a degree to join the international discourse on important issues.

The students, led by chief blogger Samantha Finch, also wrote blog posts from the first week of pre-production through the hectic 10 days we spent on the ground in Brazil to the final night of fine tuning.

There are plenty of technical compromises in making a film on a tight schedule with essentially no budget. But I think the result deserves a wide audience and hope you’ll agree and share this with friends or contacts, particularly in Brazil.

Please wait around for the credits. There were many people who helped enormously, from Luiz Henrique Schulze, the ultimate “fixer,” to the extraordinary Brazilian mandolin virtuoso Hamilton de Holanda, who gave permission for the students to use some of his music.

The previous films in the series — on sea turtles in Mexico, cork forests in Portugal and shrimp farming in Belize — are all here.