Playlist
<p>In Bogotá, Colombia, a charismatic eleven year old named Maria Alejandra struggles to maintain a normal childhood despite the limitations imposed by a rare skin disease. Conflict between mother and daughter arises when Maria refuses to attend school early one morning.</p>
<p>Our skin both exposes and protects us: it is part of our sense of identity, a witness, like it or not, to the events in our lives, a tool of communication, and plays an important role in how we relate to the world. Awarded the Prix du Jury / Jury Prize at Rencontres Internationales Sciences, Cinemas (RISC) 2015</p>
<p>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: <a href="https://silentforests.com/">https://silentforests.com/</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> In coastal Colombia, a mother teaches her daughter how to swim so that she may go to the mangroves and harvest the piangua shellfish with the other women in the village.</p>
<p>High school student and poet, Chasity Hunter, experienced intense flooding in her New Orleans neighborhood during both Hurricane Katrina and recent summer rainstorms. Inspired to find out how safe her city really is, she investigates her city’s infrastructure and questions water experts, finding her own voice along the way.</p>
<p>Children living on a former naval base re-imagine the threat of radioactive waste buried beneath their homes. In this collision of fantasy and realism, underlying environmental and class issues come to the fore in the psyches of Treasure Island's youngest residents</p>
<p>In times past an anarchist community of pirates called Madagascar home. It was an island beyond the law and off the map, a place of rogues, booty and bounties. These were outlaws moored on a marooned ecosystem. Set adrift 88 million years ago, the island is a castaway in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a band of ecological stowaways. In this splendid isolation it has evolved into an unparalleled wonderland of the weird and unique, diverse and unbelievable.</p> <p>A political coup in 2009 left the country adrift once more – isolated from the international community, deprived of foreign aid and conservation funding. One of the planet’s most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and luxury. Amidst political uncertainty, the island’s fragile and unique ecology is being smuggled out illegally, boat by boat, gem by gem.</p> <p>www.tobysmith.com<br /> www.unknownfieldsdivision.com</p>
<p>In Lesotho—a highland country surrounded by South Africa—an artist named Nthabiseng TeReo Mohanela takes discarded materials and transforms them into unique clothing and accessories. Teaching young people the benefits of recycling and re-creation, she calls her project “From Trash to Treasure.” With TeReo’s work as a starting point, this short film showcases a broader spirit of reimagination among artists in Lesotho, who use creativity to respond to entrenched social problems. Filmmakers show the need to end child marriage. Musicians write songs about climate change. Farmers collect seeds to protect endangered tree species. Designers use fashion to preserve traditional Basotho culture and challenge common perceptions of Africa. Profiling a variety of these innovators, <em>FROM TRASH TO TREASURE: turning negatives into positives</em> encourages us to take lessons from those who rethink, reuse, and reinvent in order to promote positive change.</p>
<p>Women in Science in Africa, a Silent revolution</p> <p>More than forty years ago, a woman, scientist and environmental activist, created the Green Belt movement to fight deforestation in her home region in Kenya. In 2004, this woman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This was the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to an African woman. Her name was Wangari Maathai. 15 years later, more than 35 million trees have been planted throughout the African continent. And Wangari Maathai continues to inspire a whole new generation of women who are involved in science. Today, there her successors are all over the continent; pioneers charting new paths in the traditionally male dominated world of science. Dynamic and enterprising, these African women scientists are the new face of a modern Africa that is participating in the great upheavals of our societies. But in this competitive world, they are still under-represented. We followed three of them, respectively specialists in nanochemistry, molecular biology and astrophysics.</p> <p>Who are these women? What obstacles did they have to overcome to reach the top of their game? What impact do they have on their community? Will they be able to find concrete solutions to the major challenges of the 21st century? And what if the Einstein of tomorrow were to be an African woman?</p>
<p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Encourage the patients from a mental hospital to form relationships with each other, get married and live as a family. That’s the bold new idea of the head of Ehsan House in Southern Tehran. For the past 20 years, its 480 patients have lived in separate male and female units with no hope of ever leaving or of having meaningful sexual relationships.</p> <p>But in 2017, the head of the centre secured the money to build a new unit of marital facilities. Despite strong opposition, he was convinced the patients would benefit from being in a couple.</p> <p>As a selection committee begins evaluating patients, hidden affections come to the surface. Finally, the team selects two patients to form the first couple. Are these two patients capable of having a relationship that leads to marriage? What do their families think? And what about the patients who weren’t selected but still crave human relationships?</p> <p>(Countries of production : Iran, France, & Qatar)</p> <p>Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival 2020 (Greece): Newcomers Competition, Millenium Film Festival 2020 (Belgium), Visions du réel 2020 (Switzerland): Latitudes Section</p>
<p>Located just outside Rio de Janeiro, Jardim Gramacho, Brazil, is the world's largest garbage landfill. Modern artist Vik Muniz works with the so-called catadores, the men and women who pick through the refuse, to create art out of recycled materials. Muniz selects six of the garbage pickers to pose as subjects in a series of photographs mimicking famous paintings. In his desire to assist the catadores and change their lives, Muniz finds himself changed as well.</p>
<p>Sisters Carmelina and Flora Ramos Garcia, both in their late 50s, have been growing some of the world's best coffee in the Western Highlands of Guatemala for over 30 years. But over the last five years, climate change-related impacts including coffee leaf fungus and severe drought have decimated the country's crop, eliminating over 100,000 jobs in Guatemala between 2012-2016. This dramatic shift has spurred more out-migration of males and youth to the U.S. -- including Flora & Carmelina's children -- leaving these two fierce women to battle the front lines of climate change.</p>
<p>What happens in our brains when we're daydreaming? This episode is a dream-like ride that explores the science behind why, as we rush into the future, it's more important than ever to let our minds wander.</p> <p>Part of series "<a href="http://www.moxieinstitute.org/thefuturestartshere">The Future Starts Here</a>"</p> <p>About "<a href="http://www.moxieinstitute.org/thefuturestartshere">The Future Starts Here</a>": Explore what it means to be human as we rush head first into the future through the eyes, creativity, and mind of Tiffany Shlain, acclaimed filmmaker and speaker, founder of The Webby Awards, mother, constant pusher of boundaries and one of Newsweek's "women shaping the 21st Century."</p>
<p>Desertification in Kenya resulting from unsustainable development and use of trees for firewood, has caused substantial environmental damage such as Drought, land erosion, dried up river bed due to insufficient amount of rain and lose of wildlife and birds; Social damage such as families going hungry because their crops have failed, villagers having to walk long distance to find water or firewood and villages losing their land to developers.</p> <p>One woman, Wangari Maathai, decided to empower communities by giving them the tools and knowledge to replant the country with trees creating ʻgreen beltsʼ of forest, especially in the mountain catchment areas where rivers flow from, in order to prevent further environmental damage- soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, clean water. Women are supported through the scheme to nurture seedlings in tree nurseries and planting trees, through a sustainable and viable framework. The long-term vision of the Green Belt movement is to create a movement beyond our 4000 community groups and plant 10 billion trees in Kenya. What started as a simple tree planting programme became a movement that helped bring about democracy in Kenya.</p>