Sentinels

For her entire professional life, renowned ecologist Nalini Nadkarni pioneered climbing techniques to study "what grows back” after an ecological disturbance in the rainforest canopy. Now, after surviving a life-threatening fall from a tree, she must turn her research question onto herself in order to understand the effects of disturbance and recovery throughout her life.

The Elk sculpture is a beloved icon in Portland, Oregon, but it was sidelined during the 2020 protests. Six years later, it returns, this time to a city and a nation divided over who or what belongs on a pedestal. As protest consumed Portland, Ore. in 2020, the city removed a beloved elk sculpture for safekeeping. Six years later, the elk is the first of the city's damaged monuments to return, and the only sculpture without controversy. But in a city that never really stopped protesting, people remain divided over why the elk went away—and what it means for the dinged-up but refurbished symbol to finally return. Set in an American city reckoning with its symbols of westward expansion, the unfolding fate of the elk and the other sculptures tells the story of a nation divided over who and what belongs on a pedestal.

A woman finds peace during the pandemic in her solitary routine as the innkeeper of an historic Bay Area lighthouse. As her time on the island draws to an end and a return to the world she left behind beckons, life on the island raises larger questions about our relationship to the natural world, time, work, and home.

The most destructive wildfire in California history leveled Paradise in November 2018. As the seniors of Paradise High finish out the school year away from their shuttered campus, they must reconsider what it means to leave home.