No platform wanted to take on the Oscar-shortlisted documentary, so Yanuni is free on Leonardo DiCaprio's YouTube channel!
The documentary Yanuni by director Richard Ladkani has been available free of charge worldwide since 5 September 2026, and that on Leonardo DiCaprio's official YouTube channel, DiCaprio being one of the film's producers as well. The date was no accident, the fifth of September is Amazon Day. Last year the film made the Oscar shortlist of fifteen documentary features and travelled through several dozen festivals.
Who is Juma Xipaia
The central figure of the film is Juma Xipaia, chief of the village of Kaarimã in the indigenous Xipaya territory near Altamira in the state of Pará. In 2015 she became the first woman ever elected chief in the Middle Xingu region. At eighteen she publicly declared that her life would be a fight for the rights of her people, and she has survived six assassination attempts since. She has stood up to illegal gold prospecting, large-scale mining, deforestation and companies laying claim to her ancestors' land.
The film also captures her move from activism into high politics. After the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples was created in 2023, Juma became its first ever secretary for the rights of indigenous peoples. Alongside her stands her husband Hugo Loss, a former special forces member and helicopter pilot, today head of special operations at the Brazilian environmental inspectorate IBAMA. He is the one who leads armed raids on illegal mining camps deep in the rainforest.
An eco-thriller, not a nature film
Richard Ladkani filmed with Juma and Hugo for five years and built the film as a thriller, not as a classic documentary about nature. Ladkani is behind the camera himself, the music was composed by H. Scott Salinas and the title song was recorded by the indigenous artist Katú Mirim. The editing was handled by Georg Michael Fischer. Reviewers praised above all the combination of political tension and visual poetics, where scenes from a demonstration outside the Brazilian Congress, at which police opened fire on the protesters, alternate with shots of the rainforest filmed from immediate proximity.
The second strand of the film is the relationship between Juma and Hugo and their wait for a daughter. The film is named after her, Yanuni is the name of their daughter and in the context of the film it stands for new life in the middle of a hostile environment.
Why YouTube and not a streaming platform
According to the campaign around the film, run by the filmmakers together with the Earth Alliance organisation, none of the big streaming services was willing to take the documentary on. The argument the filmmakers say they hear over and over is that audiences do not watch documentaries like this. The free release on DiCaprio's channel is therefore both a distribution solution and a gesture.
The film is available with subtitles in eight languages: English, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Thai. A Czech subtitle version is not available so far.
“From the territory out into the world. I am proud that we decided to put the film on YouTube for free, so that this story reaches everyone,” Juma Xipaia said in a statement on the film's release.
Director Ladkani says he sees media reach as the main reason he went into the project: “We have to start listening again to people like Juma Xipaia,” Ladkani said in an interview for Gold Derby back during the Oscar voting.
A journey through festivals and the Oscars
Yanuni had its world premiere on 14 June 2025 as the closing film of the Tribeca festival in New York. According to the production, thirty-five festivals in twelve countries screened it over the following six months and the film collected twenty-one awards. Among them the prizes for best documentary and best director at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, the main Grand Teton award at the Jackson Wild Media Awards, a special mention in Palm Springs, the Shared Earth Foundation award at the DC Environmental Film Festival and the International Green Film Award at Cinema for Peace. In December 2025 the film made the shortlist of fifteen documentaries in the race for the Oscar for best documentary feature. It did not make it into the final five nominees, however. The award in this category eventually went to the Czech and Danish film Mr. Nobody Against Putin.
Who stands behind the film
Yanuni is a co-production of Austria, Brazil, the USA, Canada and Germany and the producers are Anita Ladkani, Richard Ladkani, Juma Xipaia, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Davisson and Phillip Watson, with executive producers Dax Dasilva, Joanna Natasegara, Laura Nix, Eric Terena, Martin Choroba and Philipp Schall. The film was made by Malaika Pictures in cooperation with Appian Way, Nia Tero, Age of Union and Tellux Gruppe, with support from the Austrian film institute ÖFI+. The impact campaign in support of Instituto Juma, the organisation Juma Xipaia founded in 2020, is run by Earth Alliance.
Richard Ladkani has more than fifty documentaries behind him. The best known are Sea of Shadows, about the fight for the survival of the vaquita in the Gulf of California, which won the audience award at Sundance, and The Ivory Game, about ivory smuggling, released by Netflix and likewise placed on the Oscar shortlist. Both titles were produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and on both Ladkani was also behind the camera.
WHERE TO WATCH: YouTube, Leonardo DiCaprio's channel, free of charge and without registration, playback outside YouTube is not permitted. You can watch the whole film Yanuni at this link.
Sources: Variety, Deadline, Mongabay, Gold Derby, Rolling Stone Brasil, Sumaúma, Revista Amazônia, Hello Magazine, NÖN, Malaika Pictures, AFI Silver, IMDb, Wikipedia