Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

For millennia, Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain their traditional land management practices. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. As the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America's original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.

As Singapore dredges sand from beneath Cambodia's mangrove forests, an ecosystem, a communal way of life, and one woman's relationship to her beloved home are faced with the threat of erasure.

The Atomic Tree is a virtual reality journey into the memories of one of the most revered trees in the world—a 400-year-old Japanese White Pine bonsai that survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima. Directed and produced by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

Kanaka Maoli poet and activist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio immerses us in the concept of aloha ‘āina—a love for and of the land embodied by her poetry, her family, and the movement at the foot of Mauna Kea—as she fights to protect the sacred mountain from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.

In the Khmer language, the root word for “nature” and “country” is cheate, meaning “taste”: to truly understand the essence of the land, one must know it through the senses. Since fleeing Cambodia with her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, and a genocide which devastated an entire culture and displaced millions of people from their homes, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. This film follows her to the landscapes of her homeland—changing through deforestation, industrialization, urbanization and development—where she has spent years tenderly documenting the disappearing, relational ways of life held within them. As she comes to know these places not only through the lens of her camera, but through the intimate relationships she forms with the landscapes and people whose stories she shares, Kalyanee awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within.

Elemental follows three outsiders who are obsessed by nature and driven by a deep desire to change the status quo. Rajendra Singh, an Indian government official gone rogue, mounts a national crusade to save the Ganges River. Activist Eriel Deranger leads a David and Goliath fight against the oil giants who are destroying her homeland in the Canadian Tar Sands. Australian inventor, Jay Harman, is attempting to halve the world's energy consumption by mimicking natural systems. Separated by continents, each character is part of a global story about water and climate change that goes beyond the issues to reveal the public triumphs and emotional scars of life on the front line.

On a remote Icelandic island, teenagers Birta and Selma take it upon themselves to counteract society's harmful impact on nature, exchanging night-time parties for nocturnal puffin rescues in a coming-of-age story for young adults and puffins alike.

Silence just might be on the verge of extinction and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton believes that even the most remote corners of the globe are impacted by noise pollution. In Sanctuaries of Silence, join Hempton on an immersive listening journey into Olympic National Park, one of the quietest places in North America.