First-time Mexican director Pablo Pérez Lombardini learned a few years ago that Mexico is the country where the most environmentalists are killed each year. Most of them women. So Lombardini set out to do what he knows how to do – bring the language of film to their plight. The result is the beautifully haunting, and terribly tragic film La Reserva, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and will be showing at Michoacán’s prestigious Morelia Film Festival this month.

La Reserva opens with a quiet but powerful poem describing the natural beauty of Chiapas, Mexico. Through a night lens, Lombardini captures ant eaters, leopards, and wildcats protecting the forest quietly at night. Julia, an equally determined and focused conservationist park ranger, soon enters the picture. She traverses this natural reserve of beauty, collecting trash and protecting the environment, nominally under the auspice of a governmental agency but really because she is as passionately devoted to the environment as she is to her daughter, her mother, and her Indigenous community.

Soon, this peaceful idyll is shattered by a thunderous tree-cutting electric saw. Startled, Julia – who is played by Carolina Vasquez, a real-life conservationist working in the area – sets off to investigate. What follows is a heartbreaking yet unquestionably inspiring call to action. It’s clear Lombardini profoundly admires both his human subject and his environmental one.

In the mostly fictional La Reserva, Julia will soon discover that she cannot count on her local, coffee-growing community to take a firm stand against deforestation with her. How can you blame them? This year’s coffee crop is spoiled – ironically, by climate change itself – and every one of the local farmers are struggling. Julia’s steadfast dedication to protecting the forest is a nuisance and maybe even a threat to them, as they have seen powerful interests get away with murder (literally). These humble folks just want to avoid trouble.

Making matters worse, the enemy isn’t all the obviously villainous organized crime syndicate. Neighboring displaced communities make their way into the reserve. Later, immigrants from Central and South America, turned back from the United States and stuck in a Mexican exile, enter the picture as well. All of which is happening in real life, not just on the silver screen, which La Reserva makes you care about.

Julia is nothing short of an astounding woman. She works not only as a conservationist, but also a midwife, the only local schoolteacher, and caregiver to her young daughter and her prickly, aging mother. Eventually, her unwavering commitment to her ideals puts her in harm’s way.

After the well-attended premiere at Telluride, Lombardini stuck around for a few questions. He wrote the film by outlining the plot, but then used acting coaches to help the locals act out scenes with prompts, but not exact lines. The result is a hyper-realistic rendition of how people in rural Mexico speak so the film feels like a well-manicured documentary. And Carolina’s real life differs in important ways from our tragic heroine Julia – including that she continues to protect the ecosystem.

Most impressive of all is how quiet La Reserva is. The film rings loud, urgent alarms, but not with red lights or sirens. The depth of the story is far too powerful for that, and the delivery far, far more effective.

Why do so few care about these urgent issues, not just in Mexico, but in the world? How can we even find a way out of climate change, when the bad actors are not just neglectful governments and malicious criminals, but other equally oppressed peoples? How can we support the life missions of determined, selfless women like Julia/Carolina?

Lombardini believes that cinema has the power to start a conversation, to spark a fire. If anything can, it’s surely La Reserva, one of the most moving and memorable features to have played at Telluride this year.

But there is a tragedy, too, in Lombardini’s own quest. His film is still looking for distribution. Despite some funding from Mexican and Qatari state agencies, La Reserva is stuck waiting for the powers that be to decide that it’s worthy. Time will tell if we can manage to care about this film that so artfully portrays a real-world problem.

In the meantime, the trees will continue to fall in Julia’s forests, even if audiences purposefully cover their ears not to hear them.