According to NASA Climate change reports, the current global warming trend is particularly significant due to increasing human activity since the mid 20th century. Pollution, extinction and forced migrations are some of the consequences we continue to face due to this urgent crisis. ‘Eco-Warrior’ recognizes the efforts of those amongst us that continue the fight against human-made mass extinctions and emissions. You will meet children, plants, animals, tribes, communities, artists, activists, grassroots organizations and future generations whose sole ambition is leave the world better than they found it. Resistance and collaboration are the core values driving these forces to involve, educate and inspire others to join in the fight.
Mama Qota is a seventeen minute documentary interviewing Aymaran men (native Peruvians) in thier own language (subtitles in English). These community representatives (the women wouldn’t speak on camera) illuminate our understanding of how this culture relates to the lakes in thier home land as an extension of thier own bodies, and as a spiritual source as well as ending ground. Marina Morikawa is a modern day environmental scientist who has been miraculously successful cleaning the pollution of these water bodies using natural methods. He is also interviewed, revealing a similar understanding of how we are mirrors of our Earth.
A dialogue between two utopian thinkers sharing visions and recipes for a ‘better’ tomorrow to reflect upon the complexity of our universe.
Water Warriors is the story of a community’s successful fight to protect their water from the oil and natural gas industry.
In 2013, Texas-based SWN Resources arrived in New Brunswick, Canada to explore for natural gas. The region is known for its forestry, farming and fishing industries, which are both commercial and small-scale subsistence operations that rural communities depend on. In response, a multicultural group of unlikely warriors–including members of the Mi’kmaq Elsipogtog First Nation, French-speaking Acadians and white, English-speaking families–set up a series of road blockades, preventing exploration. After months of resistance, their efforts not only halted drilling; they elected a new government and won an indefinite moratorium on fracking in the province.
Faced with the injustices of this world, Margot has lost all hope in the future. Giving up on politics, she decides to entrust her fate to the Dardu, a legendary carp that supposedly predicts the future. But the lake’s rules have changed: fishing is now forbidden.
Face aux injustices du monde, Margot ne sait plus si l’avenir a un sens. Désabusée, ne croyant plus aux luttes politiques, elle veut s’en remettre au Dardu, une carpe légendaire sensée prédire l’avenir. Mais le règlement du lac a changé : la pêche y est interdite.
Has Iceland always been a treeless land? Can any forests grow on this island of glaciers and volcanos? The film responds to these questions by telling a story of the forestry in Iceland. It explains why considering the genetic aspects of seeds, cuttings and seedlings is key for resilient forests in the times of changing climate.
You can read more about the afforestation in Iceland here : http://www.euforgen.org/about-us/news/news-detail/regreening-iceland/
An alternative reality scenario where a group of animals has become organised and are committed to making themselves heard by humans, guerrilla style.
A personal perspective on coming home after nearly a decade abroad and finding that something is off in the familiar paradise. A warning that profound change is coming. Change that will influence future generations.
In 10 years everything changes…
When Arnold returns to his native community in the Peruvian Amazon after living in the urban world, he remembers the stories told to him by his grandfather and the great importance of maintaining balance with the jungle.
We travel for a bit besides a little girl that will show us her view on how to take care of nature.
Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart: The ZAD
The film on the ZAD focuses on Europe’s largest autonomous territory, located close to Nantes in France. The ZAD (zone to defend) emerged from the struggle against a new airport. In 2012 the French state’s attempt to evict the zone was fiercely resisted by more than 40,000 people. The police have not set foot there since. Today 250 people in 60 collectives live permanently at the ZAD occupying the wetlands, fields and forests. The ZAD is a successful example of the way resistance and the creation of alternatives need to happen at the same time. While people take back control over their lives with self-organized bakeries, workshops, a brewery, medicinal herb gardens, a rap studio, weekly newspaper and a library, they hinder the construction of an unnecessary, ecologically disastrous airport project. The film is built around a group discussion with activists living at the ZAD.
Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart” consists of six films on the climate justice movement. For more info, visit:
https://www.ressler.at/everythings_coming_together/
Bleu Nuit (Midnight Blue)
This ecological tale takes us to the heart of the underwater world, between night and light, following the rhythm of a whale’s meditations, a privileged witness of human activity on the oceans.
For the downstream communities of the high mountains of Quimsacocha, water is sacred. So when the giant Canadian company set their eyes to mine their land for gold and copper, 30-year-old Bolivar and 73-year-old Isaura were not happy.
Isaura and Bolivar rely on water for their livelihood. Isaura owns four cows and Bolivar is in charge of the community’s water system. For them, water is life, and mining will jeopardize the future of their communities.
Quimsacocha takes an honest look at these indigenous communities, their cultural traditions, and their lives in this picturesque landscape of the Western Andes Mountains in southern Ecuador.
A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions — plant, child, filmmaker — in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”
A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.
This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before 4.9 million barrels of oil was spilled by Deepwater Horizon between April 20-July 15, 2010. Wave patterns fill the frame, tearing apart the filmstrip itself.
Selected Screenings: Berwick FIlm & Media Arts Festival, 2017 (Berwick-on-Tweed, UK)
60 Elephants. Episodes of a Theory
In 60 Elephants, Michael Klein and Sasha Pirker portray the thoughts and work of Yona Friedman, a ninety-five-year-old French architect and humanist who was awarded the Friedrich Kiesler prize in 2018*. Friedman developed visions of an improvisation-capable, mobile architecture for a migrating global society as early as the 1950s and 1960s. His remarks on the current refugee issue, which are presented in the film, reveal his considerate and unagitated way of thinking oriented on social needs and their sensible fulfillment. Friedman´s rural and also urban living and working spaces are presented in insightful passages consistently accompanied by his own voice from off screen, providing a red line through the intrinsically clearly structured film.
The film begins with a shot of a space: from time to time light reflections from outside glide across the walls of a room that is nearly empty before being filled by Friedman´s voice from off screen. Reality inscribes itself into the space as though by chance, establishing it as a dynamic potential rather than self-contained entity. These shots thus possess metaphorical significance for the work of the architect. His life´s work comprises developing architecture as an offer that is not self-contained, but instead, gives inhabitants the opportunity to participate in its design, which is based, or rather, is first given sense by the necessity of communication and social behavior. In Friedman´s comparisons with the animal world, from which the film takes its title, he clarifies that social structures define and limit group formation. 60 Elephants, like Friedman´s work, is a plea for the realizability of utopias. (Rainer Fuchs)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt
* Yona Friedman has passed away on Feb.20th 2020.
Alex lives as a hermit on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. He rarely socializes with human beings, sharing his life with animals instead — birds, geese, donkeys. Smaller creatures also find shelter at his place. Observing flies and spiders through a jeweler’s loupe, Alex takes pains that the law to eat or be eaten is not a possibility in his own kingdom. “There is nothing more important than anything else.” This universal equality of all living beings would amount to a radical non-violence among the creatures. As far as Alex is concerned, he has made this utopia a reality in his little world. At a certain point, Jan Prazak asks, who is Alex? “Who am I? God, I’d like to know that myself.” Alex has decided to live in the present as simply as possible, an individual, dismissing notions of the future and past as ill-conceived. Perhaps this is also his way of existing on par with all the beings that surround him, for it is said animals do not perceive time.
However, people with a biography do face inescapable circumstances, as Alex at least indicates when he speaks of his childhood growing up in a mining settlement (a “slum”), or a son to whom he cannot relate because he perceives him as a stranger. Occasionally Alex cleans himself up when his girlfriend visits on weekends: “Women like fresh sheets.” Even a hermit has to take a break once in a while. The closing image is reserved for donkeys gazing out at the sea. Their tranquility is what Alex is searching to find. (Bert Rebhandl)
Translation: Eve Heller
The Ballad of Holland Island House
The Ballad of Holland Island House is a short animation made with an innovative clay-painting technique in which a thin layer of oil-based modelling clay comes to vibrant life frame by frame. Animator Lynn Tomlinson tells the true story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay. Told from the house’s point of view, this film is a soulful and haunting view of the impact of sea-level rise.
This short animation by artist and animator Evelyn Lambart offers a wordless plea for the right of all living creatures to a clean, unpolluted environment. With rich colour and intricate animated motion, the film features birds, butterflies and other woodland creatures succumbing to air pollution caused by human inventions.
This Oscar®-winning short film is comprised of a lecture given to students by outspoken nuclear critic Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility in the USA. Her message is clear: disarmament cannot be postponed. Archival footage of the bombing of Hiroshima and images of its survivors seven months after the attack heighten the urgency of her message.
H2O
A little boy of 10 years joyously walks in the jungle, enjoying the beauty of the waterfalls and animals. Decades later, a child, while watching such sceneries on TV, is drinking canned water. The original location of these sceneries shown on TV, have been transformed into residential areas after water resources were dried out due to destructive human activities.
The year is 2183. Earth is dead. With all evidence of organic life lost, a cosmic archaeologist travels faster than light into deep space to capture images of the once vibrant planet. When his vessel is damaged he must take matters into his own hands, risking his life to witness humanity’s lost home.
Every individual matters, every action counts.
A group of passionate and adventurous young people leave their known worlds behind to spend 100 days in the jungles of Borneo. Their mission is to confront one of the great global challenges of our time, saving rainforests and giving hope to endangered orangutans. Their task is enormous and the odds are against them.
Jojo, an orphaned baby orangutan, is entrusted in their care and they must find a way to return her to her forest home. To do this, they need to build an orangutan rehabilitation centre and work with the local communities to protect their forest. They start a reforestation nursery and create a musical education show for local schools. Under the guidance of their mentor Dr Willie Smits, they introduce an innovative satellite monitoring system called Earthwatchers and enlist the help of school students around the world. The system is put to the test when the bulldozers move in and threaten the future of a nearby community living in a traditional longhouse.
This is a story about what it takes it be an eco-warrior, an individual willing to step up and take action to avert a global catastrophe taking place before our eyes. The eco-warriors represent a new generation, ready to face what is happening on our planet and willing to do something, no matter how small, to build a more humane and balanced world. For them, every individual matters, every action counts.
Animation short looking at mankinds relationship with the natural world.
Stop everything.
(Where is the world going)
After the seas have disappeared, a courageous young pilot fights against vicious sky pirates for control of the last remaining source of water: the clouds.
Detroit Hives is a short documentary about an urban bee farm in East Detroit run by Tim Paule and Nicole Lindsey, a young couple working to bring diversity to the field of beekeeping and create opportunities for young Detroit natives to overcome adversity. Detroit ranks fourth in the United States for the most vacant housing lots with well over 90,000 empty lots to date. In an effort to address this issue, Detroit Hives has been purchasing vacant lots and converting them into buzzing bee farms. Detroit Hives explores the importance of bringing diversity to beekeeping and rebuilding inner-city communities one hive at a time.
Green Warriors: Indonesia, The World’s Most Polluted River
Citarum river, Indonesia, is the world’s most polluted river.
A reporter teamed up with international scientists to investigate the causes and consequences of this pollution.
One of the main polluters is actually the fashion industry : 500 textile factories throw away their wastewater directly into the Citarum river.
Thanks to the help of concerned citizens, the « Green Warriors » team analyzed water samples, rice, children’s hair, etc. and found out many toxic chemicals are endangering the lives of the 14 million Indonesians using the Citarum water.
These findings made the Indonesian governement change its wastewater regulations. The president also recently announced a new plan to clean up the Citarum.
The fashion brands questioned in this documentary promised a better control of their Indonesian suppliers.
Boy-Zshan Bi-den (Buffalo Return)
Bison were nearly exterminated across North America. Thanks to the Shoshone tribe, the National Wildlife Federation and the coordinated efforts of a host of other individuals and organizations, bison have finally been brought back the Wind River Indian Reservation and a landscape that they once defined.
Water Flows Together elevates the importance of acknowledging Indigenous land in outdoor recreation through the voice of Colleen Cooley, one of the few female Diné (Navajo) river guides on the San Juan River. The film is a meditation on the challenges Colleen and her community have faced, the kinship she has with the San Juan River, and the unique opportunities her role as a river guide affords as she seeks to create positive change.
There’s Something in the Water
Ellen Page brings attention to the injustices and injuries caused by environmental racism in her home province, in this urgent documentary on Indigenous and African Nova Scotian women fighting to protect their communities, their land, and their futures.
The Church Forests of Ethiopia
Nearly all of Ethiopia’s old-growth forests have disappeared. This film tells the story of Ethiopia’s church forests — pockets of lush biodiversity that surround hundreds of churches — and the efforts to protect them.
Remixing Madagascar follows Ben Mirin on his exploration of Madagascar’s wildlife, music, and conservation. Ben set out to explore the island and record the sounds of the country’s unique lemurs, birds, and other animals. Utilizing these recordings, Mirin transforms the voices of nature, along with those of the people he meets during the journey, into original music that celebrates the biodiversity and conservation of one of the most unique places on the planet.
Our Gorongosa — A Park for the People
Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique has become one of Africa’s most celebrated wildlife restoration stories. After a decade of renewed protection, Gorongosa’s large mammal population has increased 10-fold to over 100,000 animals. But the Park must also find a way to co-exist with the 200,000 people living in surrounding communities.
Dominique Gonçalves, a young African elephant ecologist shares the inspiring story of how Gorongosa is becoming a new model for wildlife conservation and community development. By bringing large-scale, long-term health care, agriculture support, and girls’ education to surrounding communities, Gorongosa is redefining the identity and purpose of this national park.
SILENT FORESTS is an intimate, character-driven portrait of conservationists and activists who are fighting against all odds to stop forest elephant poaching in Africa’s Congo Basin region.
After a study revealed that more than half the central African forest elephant population has been lost to poaching in the last decade, there has been a concerted effort to save those that remain. SILENT FORESTS will explore this story through a range of dynamic subjects; including one of Cameroon’s first female eco-guards, a grassroots wildlife law enforcement group, a Congolese biologist studying elephant behavior, a reformed elephant poacher, and a team of anti-poaching sniffer dogs led by a Czech conservationist. As passionate and tenacious as these conservationists are, they are up against huge institutional challenges like corruption and lack of funding that threaten to derail all their attempts to fight for the future of the forest elephant.
More info: https://silentforests.com/
In the midst of a city-wide protest, a group of climate activists (Emma Thompson, Rakhee Thakrar, Tom Glynn-Carney, Gary Beadle & Francis Magee) meet with a senior conservative MP (Nicholas Rowe & Charlotte Hamblin) to discuss their demands. The seas are rising, the world is ending, but life continues. This is a comedy about climate change.
The District’s Solar for All program is one of the most progressive solar mandates in the United States, with a goal of providing 100,000 low- to moderate-income families with lower energy costs through solar. Solar For All explores how the District is using innovation and equitable access to local, clean energy to lower the energy burden for the city’s most vulnerable residents and protect underserved communities in the face of our changing climate.
Avanyu — Protecting the Rio Grande
The Wild & Scenic Rio Grande in Northern New Mexico is a stunning river that threads it’s way through Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, flowing south through the heart of the state. But for Louie Hena and his family, the river is more than an office, more than a provider, it is home. Louie is a member of the Tesuque Pueblo, and with his children and his grandchildren, teach visitors about the river and it’s critical importance to his people, and us all.
Women on a Mission, Technology Meets Tradition
A young Indigenous woman sets out to document the traditional knowledge of the older women in her community — helping revive nearly forgotten customs as they work to restore their forest after decades of destruction.
It’s the year 2055 and the world has been ravaged by climate change. London is underwater, Sydney is on fire and nuclear war has turned India into a wasteland. An archivist looks back at old footage from the year 2008 to understand why humankind failed to address climate change. From the director of McLibel and starring Pete Postlethwaite, this bold, provocative film warns of the dire consequences of our failure to stop climate change.
Experience Greenland through the eyes of Artist Zaria Forman, Nasa scientist, John Sonntag and Inuit Elder Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq “Uncle.” Each character represents different ways we as humans internalize information. Heart, Mind and Spirit. Zaria travels back to Greenland to find inspiration for her next body of work, so that she care share the awe she feels in these landscapes for those who cannot travel to them. She is also visiting the location she spread her mom’s ashes, and ode to the woman who inspired her to travel and make art. John Sonntag is the lead scientist for Operation IceBridge. He and his crew works tirelessly aboard a P-3 to gather information on the greenland ice sheet. Uncle is an inuit elder who speaks for the ice. He has traveled all around the world but still isn’t convinced his message has been heard, even though his elders saw the ice melting for the first time in the 1960s. An example of the intersection of art, culture and science in a region defined by climate change.
