O Retorno da Terra Tupinambá

ARCTIC SUMMER is a poetic meditation on Tuktoyaktuk, an Indigenous community in the Arctic. The film captures Tuk during one of the last summers before climate change forced Tuk's coastal population to relocate to more habitable land.

Documents the conflicts and tensions that arise between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used throughout the Bolivian lowlands, and much of the rest of the Amazon basin, to secure labor in remote areas.

From a historic genocide trial to the overthrow of a president, the sweeping story of mounting resistance played out in Guatemala’s recent history is told through the actions and perspectives of the majority indigenous Mayan population, who now stand poised to reimagine their society.

A documentary on the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population, with first hand accounts by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.

As the name of this short film promises, a filmmaker (Merata Mita), a cook (Anne Thorp) and a singer (Moana Maniapoto) sit down for an interview at Pākiri beach. With a focus on their personal lives, these highly accomplished wahine Māori are generous in sharing what motivates and challenges them in their mahi — with friendship a recurring theme. Filmed a year after the disbanding of her group Moana and the Moahunters, Maniapoto is particularly vulnerable in her reflections. The film was made by Honours student Sam Cruickshank as part of a Film and Media Studies degree at Auckland University.

This documentary film explores the world of the bow and the extraordinary masters who make them. The bow is the Cinderella of the orchestra—the overworked and overshadowed ally to its more glamorous partners. Few people, even among lovers of classical music, think of the bow as an instrument in its own right, but players of stringed instruments see them differently. To musicians, the bow is as essential to expressing the soul of the music as the violin or cello. The film follows the journey of the “silent servant” of the music world—from the workshops of the virtuosos of the trade, to the birthplace of the bow in France, and to Brazil, home to the imperiled tree from which the world’s finest bows are made.

The Documentary tells the story of Jane Vanini from the author's reflections on her militancy-building process. Starting with the meeting of the two during the “Jornadas de 2013”, we will look at Jane's path as we follow steps, from her hometown, Cáceres, to Concepcion, in Chile. It is the possibility of discussing this journey from a personal point of view that makes this project unique and takes us to social, political and human borders. This window is opened to us through Jane's 41 letters to her family, allowing us to glimpse nuances of her intimacy and militancy choices. It was while researching Jane's militancy that the author debated these reflections on his own militant career and the context in which it takes place. Telling Jane's trajectory, going through her family and religious formation and its implications for her activism was one of the moments of encounter between these two days.

INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.

Poet Layli Long Soldier crafts a searing portrait of her Oyate’s connection to the Black Hills, through first contact and broken treaties to the promise of the Land Back movement, in this lyrical testament to resilience of a nation.

The Amazon is the river of superlatives: the longest - 7,025 km, the most powerful, the most indomitable - no dam possible over hundreds of kilometres. Its waters cross the largest tropical forest in the world: the Amazon, “the lungs of the earth”. Going against the current of this gigantism, this documentary is betting on approaching this extraordinary natural space through one of its tiniest productions: the cocoa bean. Scientists, chocolate makers, producers and farmers, many are those who, faced with the deforestation of this unique ecosystem, use this chocolate seed to recreate, on a small scale, human exploitations in harmony with nature. This film tells us about the fight of those who decided to make cocoa the spearhead of environmental defense in Brazil.

A documentary on the road that tracks the journey by Georgina, an elderly transgender woman forced to cross the sandy peninsula Guajira, on foot, to obtain the thing she has desired for almost half a century: a document that will hand her the right to be what she has always felt she was, and will allow her, at long last, to vote.

A stop-motion documentary that describes the artificial mummification (black and red mummies) of the Chinchorro culture, a pre-hispanic society of fishermen and hunter-gatherers who practiced funeral rites with sophisticated techniques for body preservation 7,000 years ago, originating on the Camarones coast of Chile.

In the Bella Coola Valley, a haunting legend endures through generations as a filmmaker reckons with whether the stories of her ancestors can survive being held or if they were never meant to be captured.

In Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, a fight for our future is playing out between local Indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities hellbent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass, but for more than two years several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action.

Letter Beyond the Walls reconstructs the trajectory of HIV and AIDS with a focus on Brazil, through interviews with doctors, activists, patients and other actors, in addition to extensive archival material. From the initial panic to awareness campaigns, passing through the stigma imposed on people living with HIV, the documentary shows how society faced this epidemic in its deadliest phase over more than two decades. With this historical approach as its base, the film looks at the way HIV is viewed in today's society, revealing a picture of persistent misinformation and prejudice, which especially affects Brazil’s most historically vulnerable populations.