Audiovisual: Dyckia – tempos de extinção (Dyckia – times of extinction)
2006
The documentary “Dyckia – tempos de extinção” (“Dyckia – times of extinction”), directed by Iur Gomez e Jonas Edson Pinto and produced by Exato Segundo, is 52 minutes long and is the award-winning project at III Programa de Fomento à Produção e Teledifusão do Documentário Brasileiro – DOCTV (3rd Incentive Program for Brazilian Documentary Production and Broadcast), sponsored by the Ministry of Culture through Fundação Padre Anchieta (São Paulo) and TV Cultura in Santa Catarina.
The film begins with an endemic bromeliad known among botanists as Dyckia distachya, which is included on the Official List of Endangered Plant Species (IBAMA, 1992) and grew exclusively on the banks of Pelotas and Uruguay rivers, at the boundary of the states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. However, this plant became extinct when a dam was built for Barra Grande hydroelectric power plant. In Botany, extinction is a term a bit different from the conventional concept: it mean a species that has disappeared from its natural environment, even if it is still alive in vases or in nurseries. This is the case of Dyckia distachya. Its natural environment, which was along the rivers Uruguay and Pelotas, was eliminated by the construction of Itá, Machadinho, Barra Grande and Campos Novos hydroelectric power plants, all designed in the ’70s and built during the following decades.
