Words and images by Renato Amoroso

Pará, Brasil, 2022

When I first began working as a filmmaker and photographer in the Amazon, the boats were impossible to ignore. Towering hulls in every shape and proportion, painted in colors that seemed to borrow from the jungle and the river, each one had a personality — not simply a vessel, but a presence on the water. In the tangled maze of tributaries, they moved like sovereign beings, carrying lives, goods, and stories from one hidden bend to another.
It didn’t take long for my woodworker’s eye to notice something my city-born assumptions had overlooked: these were not products of a factory floor. They were built — plank by plank, curve by curve — entirely by hand. My questions led me into an intricate world of naval craftsmanship, tucked deep inside the largest rainforest on Earth. Here, with scarce formal training and tools no more advanced than saws, adzes, and chisels, men construct 30-meter-long, three-deck-high vessels capable of navigating both the slow, sediment-laden rivers and the unpredictable swells of the open sea.
The work is measured not in blueprints but in muscle memory. Hulls are shaped by eye, wood coaxed into form with fire and patience, fittings scavenged or forged from whatever the builders can find. These ships are not just feats of engineering born from constraint — they are acts of imagination and necessity, each one a declaration that even in the most remote corners of the Amazon, the river will always find its way to the horizon.