Until the 1950s, the Waorani were able to successfully defended their area of settlement – today’s Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon – with the aid of spears. Then Christian missionaries entered the thick rain forest and paved the way for an oil company. Nowadays many of the tribes are estranged as some want to benefit from the short-term money the company is offering while others fight to preserve their land, culture and independence under all circumstances.
Until the 1950s, the Waorani were able to successfully defended their area of settlement – today’s Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon – with the aid of spears. Then Christian missionaries entered the thick rain forest and paved the way for an oil company. Nowadays many of the tribes are estranged as some want to benefit from the short-term money the company is offering while others fight to preserve their land, culture and independence under all circumstances.
2019-06-02
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A poignant all-Indigenous English and Cree-English collaborative documentary that breaks long-held silences imposed upon indigenous children who were interned at the notoriously violent St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany First Nation, Ontario. Use of a homemade electric chair at St. Anne's and the incorporation of testimony about student-on-student abuse makes this documentary stand apart from other films about Canadian residential school experiences. This film will serve as an Indigenous historical document wholly authored by Indigenous bodies and voices, those of the Survivors themselves.
For consumers, bananas are a delicious and nutritious start to the day, a healthy snack and a fixture in our fruit bowls. For millions of residents in the banana lands, the production of bananas means social upheaval, violence and pesticide poisoning. Banana Land explores the origins of these disparate realities, and opens the conversation on how workers, producers and consumers can address this disconnect.
In the town of San Miguel Tzinacapan, in Puebla’s Nahua Mountain Range, a family lost its father. His absence transforms the lives of those who were so deeply connected to him. Tere, now in charge of the family, must make money by selling crafts. Jorge is about to finish school and will soon have to choose his own path. Chayo, 16, must make an important decision. A year has passed, and the members of the family have been able to redefine themselves, finding their own destiny while always venerating their father’s memory.
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.
Over the centuries, explorers traded tales of a lost civilization amid the dense Amazonian rainforest. Scientists dismissed the legends as exaggerations, believing that the rainforest could not sustain such a huge population—until now. A new generation of explorers armed with 21st-century technology has uncovered remarkable evidence that could reinvent our understanding of the Amazon and the indigenous peoples who lived there. Using CGI and dramatic re-creations, National Geographic re-imagines the banks of the Amazon 500 years ago, teeming with inhabitants living in the Lost Cities of the Amazon.
Psychologist and anthropologist Alberto Villoldo talks with traditional healers of Madre de Dios, a department within in Peruvian Amazonia. They and Dr. Villoldo explain aspects of ayahuasca, a powerful, plant-based medicine of crucial importance.
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.
An environmental account of Henry Ford’s Amazon experience decades after its failure. The story addressed by the film begins in 1927, when the Ford Motor Company attempted to establish rubber plantations on the Tapajós River, a primary tributary of the Amazon. This film addresses the recent transition from failed rubber to successful soybean cultivation for export, and its implication for land usage.
The documentary recreates the mythical journey made by the native peoples of Sarayaku in the Amazon, who navigated down the river for months until they reached Kachi Urku, the mountain of salt.
In Peruvian Amazonia, for the first time in many years, a Shipibo–Konibo community prepare to perform the Aneshiati ceremony: a time of dance, song, festive clothing, and drink—including the sacred tea ayahuasca.
In 1832 the government of Van Diemen’s Land sent the last Aboriginal resistance fighters into exile at Wybalenna on Flinders Island, bringing an end to the Black War and opening a new chapter in the struggle for justice and survival by Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Black Man’s Houses tells a dramatic story of the quest by Aboriginal people to reclaim the graves of their ancestors against a background of racism and denial. Documenting a moving memorial re-enactment of the funeral of the great chief Manalargenna, the film also charts the cultural strength and resilience of his descendants as they are forced to fight for recognition in a society that is not ready to remember the terrible events of the past.
Follows Martin Strel as he attempts to cover 3,375 miles of the Amazon River in what is being billed as the world's longest swim.
The AssimiNation is a political pamphlet portraying the indigenous Sámi people fighting for their existence. The film follows the on going cultural genocide of the Sámi which the current Governmental politics allow. This film is a cry for help for the last indigenous people living in the EU.
A 1970s American elementary school program encouraging students to figure out for themselves the universal building blocks of human community — family, work, faith, etc. — inflamed political sensitivities so intensely it was shelved and forgotten. Archive footage of the documentary film series at the program's core, classroom exchanges, and the ensuing controversy frames larger issues of education, politics and ideology.
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...
There are 85 million cows in the Brazilian Amazon, which means three cows for each human dweller grazing today and area that was once forest. Less than fifty years ago, in the 1970s, the rainforest was intact. Since then, a portion the size of France has disappeared, 66% of which transformed into pastures. Much of this change is a consequence of government incentives that attracted thousands of farmers from southern lands. Cattle ranching became an economic and cultural banner of the Amazon, forging powerful politicians to defend it. In 2009, there was a game changer: the Public Prosecutor's Office sued large slaughterhouses, forcing them to supervise cattle supplying farms.