English

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 change through a fundamental value shift. The river is the main character of this film. Both mirror and inspiration, the river unites all the travelers organically, where everyone has a voice – including the film crew – to share stories of humor and light, and a space to heal from the darkness of the past, of enduring historical injustice. The film is an invitation to experience these values: of thinking about our relationship to the world around us – to above all the natural world – as one of intergenerational care and guardianship rather than just ownership/use/extraction.

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 Taiga. Some of them are followers of a religious community whose leader sees himself as the Son of God and calls himself Vissarion. Since the 1990s, his followers have been building a settlement, high up on a remote mountain, for the society of the future: The Abode of Dawn. The film focuses on the villages surrounding the Abode of Dawn. Fragments and scenes from the lives of the residents shape themselves into a mosaic. Take a step back and you recognize the iridescent image of this place in all its complexity. The film does not ask: Is Vissarion truly the Son of God? Instead, it poses the question: Are the people here happier than they were where they came from?