The year is 2025 and far-right coup plotters have annihilated Brazil’s democracy, assassinating the president, closing the national congress and surrendering the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists being taken on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle realm. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved out of the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil.

The scenes are taken from Vitória Régia (Amazon Water Lily), a new short film that imagines what might have happened had Jair Bolsonaro’s plot to seize power after the 2022 election been successful.

In real life, the coup conspiracy flopped after rightwing insurrectionists rampaged through Brasília in a bungling attempt to overturn the result. Bolsonaro and his accomplices were tried and jailed.

The alternative reality presented to viewers in Vitória Régia offers a nightmarish snapshot of a future that Brazil may have escaped by the skin of its teeth – but that some fear could still lie ahead.

After the “green and yellow dagger revolution” wipes out Bolsonaro’s rivals, the military takes power, censoring the media, purging ideological “deviants” and transferring control of the Amazon to Washington in exchange for it having supported the coup.

Brazilian reporters such as the film’s lead character, Carol (played by the award-winning actor Alice Braga) are barred from entering the rainforest region without a visa, and a news blackout is imposed to stop details of the environmental calamity leaking out. Communications are cut and Indigenous leaders disappear.

Harold Goldman, the boss of an oil firm called Amazon X, celebrates Washington’s dominion over the rainforest’s natural resources, boasting to the cameras: “Olá amigos! Today marks a new chapter in the historic relationship between the United States of America and the beautiful nation of Brazil.”

The director, Denis Kamioka, known as Cisma, said the film was shot in March 2025, nearly a year before Donald Trump ordered Nicolás Maduro’s abduction as part of a plan to “take back” Venezuela’s oil. “It was frightening the extent to which reality and fiction became mixed up … We were constantly competing with reality,” he said.

Braga, who threw herself into Indigenous and environmental activism after first visiting the Amazon a decade ago, said: “It was crazy. We were making a fiction film … but then the US ended up taking this political stance with Trump … and the film became almost a documentary.”

The 21-minute movie was made with the collaboration of two Indigenous networks, Coiab and Apib, to highlight the threats facing Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and champion their centuries-long quest to defend their traditional lands.

Ywyzar Tentehar, 23, an Indigenous actor who plays a key character, said she hoped the project would draw attention to an ongoing onslaught she first witnessed while growing up in Buritizal, a village in the eastern Amazon where the Guajajara people live. “Today my territory is demarcated but loggers, ranchers and land-grabbers continue to invade … and nothing is done,” Tentehar said.

The Amazon’s already fragile future once again looks in peril as Bolsonaro’s politician son Flávio is poised to challenge the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for the presidency this year.

During Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-23 administration, his anti-environmental and Indigenous policies prompted soaring deforestation and a gold rush into Indigenous lands. Activists fear such rampant destruction may return if another Bolsonaro wins power. Others fret over the future of South America’s largest democracy if a rightwing president pardons those who were jailed for their role in the failed 2022-23 coup.

In another real-life echo of the film, Flávio Bolsonaro was recently accused of offering the US access to Brazil’s rare-earth reserves – some of the world’s largest – in exchange for help in October’s election.

Braga said: “I’m really worried. I really hope people properly study the candidates rather than taking the same journey that led us to Bolsonaro’s election a few years ago … not just the presidential candidates but the ones for congress too.”

Pedro Inoue, a graphic designer and activist who is one of the film’s creators, said the film, partly inspired by a counterintuitively hope-filled climate disaster novel called The Ministry of the Future, was not all doom and gloom. Its pop aesthetic and stirring soundtrack were designed to counter despair with an upbeat message about the power of Indigenous resistance, he said.

“They are the past, the present and the future. They are the ones who have the answers about dealing with the end of the world because they’ve been dealing with it for more than 500 years.”

Kamioka hoped Vitória Régia, which is named for the lily-shaped symbol used by Indigenous dissidents in the film, would serve as “an alert about what could happen when it comes to sovereignty, Indigenous resistance and democracy itself”.

He said: “This isn’t a film about a distant future. That’s the scariest part. It’s about something that’s happening right now.”