Every year, more than 25,000 workers are enslaved by landowners in rural Brazil, mostly in the Amazon region. This video tells the story of men who set out in search of work and are taken to isolated ranches, only to find that they have been lured into debt bondage. Forced to do backbreaking work and to live in overcrowded shacks with no running water, they are treated like animals. “A bullet from my shotgun is what you have a right to here”, one worker was told. With no way out, they toil in the hope of buying back their freedom.

Two communities affected by one new global market: the trade in carbon dioxide. In Scotland a town has been polluted by oil and chemical companies since the 1940s. In Brazil local people's water and land is being swallowed up by destructive monoculture eucalyptus tree plantations. Both communities now share a new threat. As part of the deal to reduce greenhouse gases that cause dangerous climate change, major polluters can now buy carbon credits that allow them to pay someone else to reduce emissions instead of cutting their own pollution. What this means for those living next to the oil industry in Scotland is the continuation of pollution caused by their toxic neighbours. Meanwhile in Brazil the schemes that generate carbon credits gives an injection of cash for more planting of the damaging eucalyptus tree. The two communities are now connected by bearing the brunt of the new trade in carbon credits. The Carbon Connection follows the story of two groups of people from each community who learned to use video cameras and made their own films about living with the impacts of the carbon market.

TV Lata is an experience on education, creation and communication with young people of the community of Alagados in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. The contents published in this experimental television: texts, images, musics and films, have been produced by the adolescents and the collaborators of the project.