Raising Resistance

Campesinos, GMO soy, and the fight for Paraguay's land

In a Paraguayan field, a group of small farmers block a tractor to defend their land. That single act of defiance is the heartbeat of Raising Resistance, a 2011 documentary that traces what happens when industrial agribusiness moves in and a community decides to push back.

What Raising Resistance is about

Paraguay is the fourth largest exporter of soybeans in the world, and in recent decades countless hectares of forest have been cleared to make way for genetically modified soy plantations. The pesticides applied to these crops are lethal to everything except the engineered soy itself, spreading beyond field boundaries and destroying the subsistence harvests of neighbouring campesinos. Led by farmer Geronimo Arevalos, the small farmers organise: squatting farmland, confronting spraying operations, and carrying their demands from rural communities to the streets of Asunción. The film frames this local conflict as a parable about the global tension between industrial agriculture and the diversity of land, culture, and ecology it displaces.

Direction and filmmaking

Bettina Borgfeld and David Bernet co-directed and co-wrote the film, produced under the Maximage and Pandora Film Produktion banners with support from WDR/ARTE and SRG/SSR. The pair bring a cinéma vérité sensibility to the material, keeping the camera close to the campesinos over an extended period rather than relying on talking-head testimony. The result is an social documentary that is also, in equal measure, a nature documentary: the landscape itself, steadily poisoned and cleared, is as much a subject as the people who depend on it.

Festivals and awards

Raising Resistance travelled extensively on the international festival circuit after its 2011 release. It screened at the IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, one of the world's most prestigious documentary showcases, and at Visions du Réel in Nyon. The full selection list, which spans North America, Latin America, and Europe, is shown below.

Where to watch Raising Resistance online

Raising Resistance is available to stream on GuideDoc. GuideDoc is a curated platform dedicated entirely to documentary film, where half of all revenue goes directly to the filmmakers. Browse further titles in the food documentary collection for related viewing on agriculture, land use, and food systems.

Similar documentaries to watch next

If Raising Resistance resonates, GuideDoc has several documentaries exploring comparable themes of environment, community, and social struggle. Island of Hungry Ghosts examines displacement and place from a different angle, while Eskawata Kayawai: The Spirit of Transformation follows an indigenous community navigating outside pressures on their land and culture. Breathless and High Forest Tale both engage with environments under threat.