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.
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.
2017-01-01
0
An Environmental Account of Henry Ford’s Adventure in the Amazon
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.
Fordlandia is a small settlement on the River Tapajos in the Brazilian part of the Amazon, where Henry Ford set up a rubber industry in the 1920s. Mainly due to the resistance of nature, the project failed and was abandoned some 20 years later. Fordlandia is a voyage of (de)colonisation whereby the drifts and detours of modernity in uncertain places are highlighted, turning away from whatever their historical imaginaries were. The tensions between industrial and natural landscape are levelled off in a certain horizontality of hierarchies between form and content, and at the same time the animal resignifies possibilities of the community of the living.
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.
The drought in the American West is predicted to be the worst in 1,000 years. Join five Academy Award-winning filmmakers as they explore the environmental crisis of our time and how to fix it before it's too late.
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.
Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.
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.
Filmmaker Michal Siewierski embarks on an audacious journey to expose the real reasons behind the Amazon forest fires and the alarming rate of deforestation in Brazil. Ranging from people’s food choices, to major political corruption, corporate greed and crimes against people and nature. Takeout tackles the facts and stories that traditional media outlets are too afraid to cover.
Concerning Violence is based on newly discovered, powerful archival material documenting the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, accompanied by classic text from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
WILD THINGS follows a new generation of environmental activists that are mobilising against forces more powerful than themselves and saying, enough. Armed only with mobiles phones, this growing army of eco warriors will do whatever it takes to save their futures from the ravages of climate change. From chaining themselves to coal trains, sitting high in the canopy of threatened rainforest or locking onto bulldozers, their non-violent tactics are designed to generate mass action with one finger tap. Against a backdrop of drought, fire and floods; we witness how today’s environmentalists are making a difference and explore connections with the past through the untold stories of previous campaigns. Surprisingly the methods of old still have currency when a groundswell of school students inspired by the actions of 16-year old Greta Thunberg say, ‘change is coming’ and call a national strike demanding action against global warming.
Drawing surprising connections between market methods and CIA torture techniques developed in the 1950s, the film explores how well-known events of the recent past have been theaters for the shock doctrine, from Pinochet's coup in Chile, to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, to the war in Iraq today.
Our premise is that work has become an act of self-sabotage. Empty corporate jargon, ever-changing management fashions and self-serving bureaucracy masquerading as efficiency hijacked the purpose of work. Creative documentary The Happy Worker will show how we got to this point and the very human behavior that led us here. We want to show how this unhealthy system is maintained and what keeps us from calling bullshit.
In 1980, the eruption of Mount St. Helens leveled 230 square miles, sent 540 million tons of ash and volcanic rock twelve miles into the air, and blasted one cubic mile of earth from the crest of the Cascade Mountain Range. Illustrates the terrifying fury of the most destructive volcanic disaster in American history through aerial photography and survivors' own words. Shows examples of nature's plant and animal recovery seventeen years later.
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
On September 15th 2008, the day of the the collapse of Lehmans, the worst financial news since 1929, Damien Hirst sold over £60 million of his art, in an auction at Sotheby’s that would total £111 million over two days. It was the peak of the contemporary art bubble, the greatest rise in the financial value of art in the history of the world. One art critic and film-maker was banned by Sotheby’s and Hirst from attending this historic auction: Ben Lewis.
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.
A man that is a stranger, is an incredibly easy man to hate. However, walking in a stranger’s shoes, even for a short while, can transform a perceived adversary into an ally. Power is found in coming to know our neighbor’s hearts. For in the darkness of ignorance, enemies are made and wars are waged, but in the light of understanding, family extends beyond blood lines and legacies of hatred crumble.
Ice has always moved. When glaciation took hold some 34 million years ago, interconnected rivers of ice combined to produce the Earth's vast ice sheets. As temperatures slowly warmed glaciers developed a unique balancing act; advancing and retreating to calibrate their annual winter accumulation against summer melt. Sometimes calving colossal icebergs into the sea. A positive feedback loop that has regulated the movement of ice for millions of years.
Public health physician Noel Nutels' ideas and the footage he made of Brazilian indigenous peoples between 1940 and 1970 come together to denounce the historic massacre against native communities.