The elders of the Kichwa community of Sarayaku preserve the history of their land for the youngest. They save the knowledge of their traditions against modernity and the invasion of their territory.
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.
Now Is the Time
2019
0
Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.
Foster Child
1987
3
A botanical expedition in Ecuador's Amazon becomes a medium for an indigenous Huaorani community to remember the genocidal colonization it suffered in the 1960s. Meanwhile, a group of ecologists from the capital tries to stop oil exploitation in the last remaining forests where the isolated Huaoranis still live, who to this day refuse to come into contact with civilization.
Toroboro: El nombre de las plantas
2024
0
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.
The Road Forward
2017
9
Documentary chronicling the government relocation of 10,000 Navajo Indians in Arizona.
Broken Rainbow
1985
5
In this searing documentary, Indigenous people share heartbreaking stories that reveal the injustices inflicted by the Canadian child welfare system.
For Love
2022
7
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.
Tawai: A Voice from the Forest
2017
6
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.
アイヌネノアンアイヌ
2021
0
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 Return
2021
7
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.
Attiuk
1963
0
Carrie Davis was part of the child removal system near the end of the Sixties Scoop. With guidance from her uncle Emmett Sack and the community, Carrie reconnects to their land, language, and culture.
Double M Country
2023
0
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.
Xondaros - Guarani Resistance
2023
0
A feature documentary about opera singer Tiriki Onus who finds a 70-year-old silent film believed to be made by his grandfather, Aboriginal leader and filmmaker Bill Onus. As Tiriki travels across the continent and pieces together clues to the film’s origins, he discovers more about Bill, his fight for Aboriginal rights and the price he paid for speaking out.
Ablaze
2022
7
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.
Revealed: How to Poison a Planet
2024
7
A dog story about a stray traveling in the dense and swallowing Amazon jungle, the dusty streets of Quito, Ecuador, and a Switzerland. Arthur joined a race, and outpaced death, to find a new life with the adopted adventure seekers.
Arthur
2017
7
A vision from Limbo, where the canoeist of the eternal lake floats in his boat, between sleep and wakefulness. When he sleeps, he dreams of the everyday of a parallel time. when he wakes up, the same song haunts him again and again. his boat, “ara” (time, in guarani) travels through time like a shooting star.
Nostalgia para el lago
2023
6
Discover the heart-wrenching tale of Ecuador’s forgotten guitar road in “Vanishing Strings of the Andes.” Witness the struggle to preserve an age-old generational craft practised high in the Andes mountains before it’s too late...
The Vanishing Strings of the Andes
2023
0
A portrait of Jaime Roldos, Ecuador's first democratically elected president, who died with his family when their plane crashed in the mountains.
La muerte de Jaime Roldós
2013
8
The Royal Tour is a groundbreaking series of television specials, produced and hosted by Emmy Award-winning journalist and CBS News Travel Editor Peter Greenberg. Guided by some of the most dynamic and powerful heads of state, Peter journeys deep inside each country to offer viewers an all access pass to extraordinary locations, historic landmarks, and cultural experiences. In this latest edition, Peter received a royal tour from the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa. For an entire week, Mr. Correa became the ultimate guide, showcasing the visual gems that his country has to offer. They took four camera crews along as they swam with piranha in the Amazon rainforest, went whale watching off the coast of Manta, shopped like a local in a rural town in the Andes Mountains, returned to the President's hometown of Guayaquil and the school he attended, visited a cacao plantation (aka chocolate) farm in Cacao, and went diving with sharks in the Galápagos Islands.
Ecuador: The Royal Tour
2016
0
In decades past, Native American artists who wanted to sell to mainstream collectors had little choice but to create predictable, Hollywood-style western scenes. Then came a generation of painters and sculptors led by Allan Houser (or Haozous), a Chiricahua Apache artist with no interest in stereotyped imagery and a belief that his own rich heritage was compatible with modernist ideas and techniques. Narrated by actor Val Kilmer and originally commissioned as part of an exhibit of Houser’s work at the Oklahoma History Center, this program depicts the artist’s tribal ancestry, his rise to regional and national acclaim, and the continuing success of his sons as they expand upon and depart from their father’s achievements. Key works are documented, as is Houser’s tenure at the Santa Fe–based Institute of American Indian Arts.
Unconquered: Allan Houser and the Legacy of One Apache Family
2008
0