Q'eros: The Shape of Survival

This Traveltalk series short brings us to Lima, Peru where we see a modern city.

A multi-billion-dollar mining project is launched by the American Newmont Mining Corporation and lays claim to the land belonging to Preuvian highlander Máxima Acuña.

Benito Arévalo is an onaya: a traditional healer in a Shipibo-Konibo community in Peruvian Amazonia. He explains something of the onaya tradition, and how he came to drink the plant medicine ayahuasca under his father's tutelage. Arévalo leads an ayahuasca ceremony for Westerners, and shares with us something of his understanding of the plants and the onaya tradition.

Four Westerners with various ailments travel to Peruvian Amazonia to drink ayahuasca, a traditional medicine renowned for its healing powers.

In Peru, Sergio García Locatelli visits both those places where human life is fragile and personal fate is uncertain and those where death reigns, places where everything is already lost, where appeal is not possible. A walk in search of the meaning of death that is actually a celebration of life and the living.

The true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates' disastrous and nearly-fatal mountain climb of 6,344m Siula Grande in the Cordillera Huayhuash in the Peruvian Andes in 1985.

In the rugged mountains of Oaxaca, young basketball players Bernabé, Tobías, and Aniceto battle systemic barriers to redefine their futures. Pushed by the demanding leadership of Sergio Zúñiga, they tackle every challenge head-on. With rising star Gustavo and the strategic guidance of trainer Sebastián, these determined athletes prove that grit, teamwork, and the power of dreams can transform not only their lives, but their entire community.

The Andes Mountains travel the western side of South America. Unlike many other mountain ranges of their altitude, the Andes do support human life on their high altitude slopes. Modern life is slowly making its way to the high altitude Andes, but the natives for the most part continue with the traditional ways of their ancestors, growing limited crops such as beans and potatoes - where the crop originated - raising sheep and pigs, and living in crude huts. The llama is the most useful of their work animals. The most conspicuous aspect of the native dress is their derby hats, the origins which are unknown. Further down the slopes, agriculture and ranching is more productive and is carried out by descendants of the Spanish settlers. There is a famous lake district in the Chilean part of the Andes, where resort hotels are located.

"Nueve Sevillas" is a heterodox psycho-geographical profile of the new flamenco in Seville. Nine characters coexist with the great flamenco artists of today.

Covenant of the Salmon People is a documentary portrait of the Nez Perce Tribe’s ancient covenant with salmon. The film follows their efforts to uphold this ancient relationship as dams and climate impacts threaten one of the cornerstones of their culture.

American tourists at SpiritQuest Sanctuary, a medicine lodge in Peru, share their thoughts about the traditional medicine ayahuasca, and their motivations for drinking it. Don Howard Lawler, founder of SpiritQuest, describes ayahuasca and its beneficial effects, as do the filmmakers themselves.

Join a team of archaeologists and the Discovery Channel in an investigation into the mysterious lines of the Nazca region in Peru. Created by the Nazcas, these huge sculptures are only visible from the sky and depict people, animal, geometric forms, and strange creatures. See a premier exhibition of pottery and textiles, musical instruments, and mummies from this long-forgotten, pre-Columbian civilization and visit Cahuachi, a buried city of pyramids and ceremonial buildings which may have once been the religious capital of the Nazca people.

Spain, 1519. Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese navigator in the service of King Charles I, undertakes, at the command of five ships, a commercial expedition to the Moluccas. The story of the first circumnavigation of the world, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano in 1522.

In the central Peruvian Amazon, a young indigenous man from the Nomatsigenga Community of Boca Kiatari, shares his urgent message with the world. In a moving short film, the community comes together to preserve their natural environment, aware of the growing challenges of climate change and global warming.

Os Carajá

Funeral Bororo

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.

Amérique latine, l'année de tous les dangers

When internationally renowned Haida carver Robert Davidson was only 22 years old, he carved the first new totem pole on British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii in almost a century. On the 50th anniversary of the pole’s raising, Haida filmmaker Christopher Auchter steps easily through history to revisit that day in August 1969, when the entire village of Old Massett gathered to celebrate the event that would signal the rebirth of the Haida spirit.

The film follows Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martinez and Kade L. Twist, who put land art in a tribal context. The group bring together a community to construct the Repellent Fence, a two-mile long ephemeral monument “stitching” together the US and Mexico.