Helena of Sarayaku

Nominated for an Emmy® Award in 2021 for best non fiction special. Winner of 35 grand jury awards. Filmed in 2016 at Standing Rock, North Dakota, this powerful documentary follows the Indigenous leaders as they unite the Native Nations for the first time in 150 years in order to rise up in spiritual solidarity against the unlawful Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens their treaty lands, sacred burial sights and clean water. These young Native Leaders honor their destiny by implementing a peaceful movement of resistance which awakens the world.

In this searing documentary, Indigenous people share heartbreaking stories that reveal the injustices inflicted by the Canadian child welfare system.

For six years, Melati, 18, has been fighting the plastic pollution that is ravaging her country, Indonesia. Like her, a generation is rising up to fix the world. Everywhere, teenagers and young adults are fighting for human rights, the climate, freedom of expression, social justice, access to education or food. Dignity. Alone against all odds, sometimes risking their lives and safety, they protect, denounce and care for others. The earth. And they change everything. Melati goes to meet them across the globe. At a time when everything seems to be or has been falling apart, these young people show us how to live. And what it means to be in the world today.

This documentary started as part of a photography project about the indigenous Ainu population in northern Japan, portraying people from tightly knit communities. They feel deeply connected by their culture and tradition. With gorgeous pictures, the directors explore how different generations of Ainu reflect on their identity after centuries of oppression.

It’s spring in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Uyantza festival is underway with the community celebrating all that the forest has to offer. Meanwhile, news is breaking around the world that a novel virus is spreading and a state of emergency is declared across the country. As people test positive for COVID-19 in the community, some families decide to leave and head deeper into the jungle. Disconnected from school, friends, the internet, and work, one family learns to reconnect with life in the forest. The children begin to unlearn the national curriculum, and instead are taught Indigenous knowledge that mainstream schools normally pass over. As COVID-19 wreaks havoc around the planet, the family reconnect to their ancestral ways, but as news arrives that Ecuador’s lockdown will end soon, will the family choose to return?

The 6 Guarani villages of Jaraguá, in São Paulo, fight for land rights, for human rights and for the preservation of nature. They suffer from the proximity to the city, which brings lack of resources, pollution of rivers and springs, racism, police violence, fires, lack of infrastructure and sanitation, among others. Unable to live like their ancestors, their millenary culture is lost as it merges with the urban culture.

The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed documentary about the rituals surrounding an Innu caribou hunt. Released in 1960, it’s one of 13 titles in Au Pays de Neufve-France, a series of poetic documentary shorts about life along the St. Lawrence River. Off-camera narration, written by Pierre Perrault, frames the Innu participants through an ethnographic lens. Co-directed by René Bonnière and Perrault, a founding figure of Quebec’s direct cinema movement.

In Inukjuak, an Inuit community in the Eastern Arctic, a baby boy has come into the world and they call him Timuti, a name that recurs across generations of his people, evoking other Timutis, alive and dead, who will nourish his spirit and shape his destiny.

The Shipibo-Konibo people of Peruvian Amazon decorate their pottery, jewelry, textiles, and body art with complex geometric patterns called kené. These patterns also have corresponding songs, called icaros, which are integral to the Shipibo way of life. This documentary explores these unique art forms, and one Shipibo family's efforts to safeguard the tradition.

“Entourage” star Adrian Grenier ventures to Cocos Island off the shore of Costa Rica to bring attention to the plight of endangered sharks who are being threatened by poachers and ocean pollution.

Explorer Bruce Parry visits nomadic tribes in Borneo and the Amazon in hope to better understand humanity's changing relationship with the world around us.

Extremely dry soil, dead animals in the fires of Australia and other visible effects of climate change every day lead to anguish and hopelessness, for which the term environmental grief is used. One way of dealing with the crisis is to take a proactive approach to environmental protection. The heroines of the film embark on this path. With their radical but strictly non-violent gatherings in public spaces, they call for a "Rebellion against extinction" to prevent ecological collapse.

Prey

The “Prophecy of the 7th Fire” says a “black snake” will bring destruction to the earth. For Winona LaDuke, the “black snake” is oil trains and pipelines. When she learns that Canadian-owned Enbridge plans to route a new pipeline through her tribe’s 1855 Treaty land, she and her community spring into action to save the sacred wild rice lakes and preserve their traditional indigenous way of life. Launching an annual spiritual horse ride along the proposed pipeline route, speaking at community meetings and regulatory hearings. Winona testifies that the pipeline route follows one of historical and present-day trauma. The tribe participates in the pipeline permitting process, asserting their treaty rights to protect their natural resources. LaDuke joins with her tribe and others to demand that the pipelines’ impact on tribal people’s resources be considered in the permitting process.

The Road Forward is an electrifying musical documentary that connects a pivotal moment in Canada’s civil rights history—the beginnings of Indian Nationalism in the 1930s—with the powerful momentum of First Nations activism today. Interviews and musical sequences describe how a tiny movement, the Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood, grew to become a successful voice for change across the country. Visually stunning, The Road Forward seamlessly connects past and present through superbly produced story-songs with soaring vocals, blues, rock, and traditional beats.

A searing examination of the contamination that sparked an international catastrophe and the decades’ long battle with some of the world’s largest chemical companies for justice and compensation.

This BBC documentary chronicles the life of folk/soft-rock singer John Denver through his rise with The Chad Mitchell Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, his subsequent stardom, his popularity decline, and his tragic death at age 53.

First Nations fight to end grizzly bear trophy hunting in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. The Heiltsuk, Kitasoo Xai'xais and Gitga'at First Nations enforce a ban by using Coastal Guardian Watchmen, while the Raincoast Conservation Foundation purchases trophy hunting licenses in the area to prevent a hunt from taking place. The film offers unique access to Canada's First Nations and a breathtaking view of the majestic animals inhabiting the Great Bear Rainforest, including the elusive Spirit Bear.

Extinction Rebellion, amour & rage

Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old student in Sweden, started a school strike for the climate as her question for adults was, if you don’t care about my future on earth, why should I care about my future in school? Within months, her strike evolved into a global movement as the quiet teenage girl on the autism spectrum becomes a world-famous activist.