The remote village in the hills has no electricity. It is early evening but already pitch black as a group of young men in their early twenties make their way along winding mountain paths to the houses of the young women they hope to woo. In an age of mobile phones and dating apps, one wonders what…
2025 Festival Curta Cinema
2024 Olhar do Norte
Through an unprecedented juxtaposition of the visual and literary works of Hélio Melo with current portraits of Acre, we embark on the artist’s struggle to tell the story of rubber tappers and indigenous peoples of the Amazon who defend the forest against threats of erasure…
2025 RAI FF
What can we learn from spaces of futures past? Derived from the Kelate word “Ggésék” for matchstick, this film is a portrait of human-machine relationships in the twilight of Malaysia’s last match factory. A space that was once bustling with over 1000 workers, is now manned by 26 with a single match dipping machine;…
2023 FNC
2024 Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
Charlotte is a young Abenaki artist who makes black ash baskets. She carries on her shoulders the legacy of all the generations that came before, which pushes her to learn as much as possible about her passion: basketry.…
In 1999 Lekal Makor, the head of an Indigenous Amis community in Taiwan, recorded their oral history. He recounted an 1877 ambush by Qing soldiers at a banquet in the Amis village of Cepo’. The events of the massacre in modern day Hualien have been buried for more than a century. The Cepo’ War is a deliberate gap in…
The director unexpectedly overheard stories about his mother’s family and decided to pick up a camera to explore a century-old history: Topa, a Tayal tribe that once lived in Sanxia but was displaced to Taoyuan’s Fuxing District due to Japanese rule. The main subjects of this documentary are descendants who are striving in their own ways to…
2024 神腦原鄉踏查紀錄片競賽一般組最佳影片
導演意外聽聞了自己母親的家庭故事，於是拿起攝影機，開始探尋被塵封百年的歷史：大豹社，一個曾經居住在三峽的泰雅族部族，因為日本統治的緣故，後裔被迫離散到了桃園復興區。而本片中的主角們，都是現今為了保存大豹記憶，而用自己的方式在努力的族裔，尋回失落的家族故事，想找到族群認同對自己的意義，透過這些，他們的生命與歷史的連結，如今一個個重見天日。
2024 TIDFF
In the Amis language, a moment signifies peace and a sense of ‘home’ when the ocean calms. This metaphorically relates to the journey of a group of Amis people who left their coastal homes in the 1970s for city work. In Taipei, they established the “Xizhou Tribe” near a riverbank, contributing to urban development…
2024 Docs Ireland
North Cormorant Island was filmed over ten years in the remote fishing village of Kitaushima (which means North Cormorant Island), on Sado Island, Japan. Until the 1960’s the village was only accessible by road, but it was prosperous, and a couple of hundred people lived there, rice-farming, fishing and raising cattle. But…
2017 TIEFF
In 1987, as Taiwan had just lifted martial law, society and the economy were undergoing rapid transformation, and Indigenous peoples faced a wave of urban migration and labor relocation. An Amis man Du-Ya Pan Ming-fu, his childhood friend Duwake, a Kavalan artist, and Lai-Sa-Gai-Nu Tian Acheng in Xiangbi Village, have different but intertwined lives. Though…
2024 Movies That Matter
2024 Doc Edge
A canoe trip down the Whanganui River in New Zealand, led by a Māori elder, joined by a Māori river guardian Ned Tapa, his friends and family, an international film crew, becomes a call to action to draw closer to nature and fight climate…
2025 Shorts México
2025 CFF
In the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, the Indigenous town of Cherán did what no one thought possible: it kicked out the cartels, shut down illegal logging, and took back control of its future. Our Roots Remain (Enraizados<span style=”font-weight:…
2024 LANAFF
2024 NYIWF
This documentary follows a feminist group of women beekeepers living on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Twenty years have passed since the US Navy stopped using Vieques as a bombing range. Still, the locals continue to live through the legacy of a military that savagely displaced the population…
2020 Collected Voices FF Collected Voices
2020 CIDSFF
A glorious past withering away in a fast-changing world – The film is about a Postal Runner, a person who runs or walks from one place to another carrying mail bags. The runner used to be held in high regard…
2023 FICM
2023 FECCH
Luz de Luna (Moonlight) became a truck driver after she escaped from a violent marriage. Along the way, she faces a world of labor exploitation and other forms of violence that, at times, make her consider quitting the job. On the edges of Mexican highways,…
2023 IDFA
2023 Busan IFF
In a remote village on the Indo-Myanmar border, seventy years after Indian independence, news floats in that electricity might arrive. People are skeptical as they have been let down too often in the past. A woman dreams of a better future. A century-old man dreams of sovereignty for his…
The film takes us to rural schools in the predominantly tribal district of Dungarpur in southern Rajasthan. Children come from difficult contexts with very limited material resources, absentee fathers and younger siblings to attend to. How do teachers respond to this situation? How do they bring children to school and create an environment in which they are…
2025 ZagrebDox
2025 ARKIPEL
Nika is one of the youngest daughters in the Yamal nomad’s family. The administration of the nearest village should take her to a boarding school very soon, separating her from family and home for a long time. A nomadic teacher must prepare Nika for departure. However, given Nika’s young…
2025 CPH:DOX
2025 Visions du Réel
Where do you go when the world feels overwhelming and just plain wrong? Can you escape and start anew? This documentary follows its protagonists for nearly a decade, as they try to build a utopian society in the Siberian…