The Golden Age (2020)

Can We Cool the Planet?

Capturing CO2 to recycle it, brightening clouds to better intercept sunlight, massive reforestation: here's an overview of scientific solutions to combat global warming that offer a glimmer of hope.

Global Warming

How far does your participation in global warming go? What is the real X-ray of the ongoing climate changes, and how can we—if at all—reverse the path we are all on? You’ll find these answers in “Global Warming”, a work featuring sixteen Brazilian experts discussing, detailing, and contextualizing climate change and its effects worldwide, especially in Brazil.

Normal Is Over

Documentary about human impact on the world.

Praise of the Distance

Province of Lugo, Galicia, Spain. A year in the life of A Fonsagrada, a rural region whose inhabitants live both near and far from urban civilization; a praise of the distance that crosses the four seasons of the year, whose inevitable passage transforms both the natural environment and the existence of people, a simple, dignified and peaceful existence.

Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog's documentary film about the "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in one man's attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.

The Reaper

Efrain, known as the Reaper, has worked at a slaughterhouse for 25 years. We will discover his deep relationship with death and his struggle to live.

Bigger Than Us

For six years, Melati, 18, has been fighting the plastic pollution that is ravaging her country, Indonesia. Like her, a generation is rising up to fix the world. Everywhere, teenagers and young adults are fighting for human rights, the climate, freedom of expression, social justice, access to education or food. Dignity. Alone against all odds, sometimes risking their lives and safety, they protect, denounce and care for others. The earth. And they change everything. Melati goes to meet them across the globe. At a time when everything seems to be or has been falling apart, these young people show us how to live. And what it means to be in the world today.

Objectif Mont Blanc, Sur Les Traces D'Un Géant

A climatologist, a physicist, and a volcanologist set out to conquer the highest peak in the Alps. Through exceptional images, the film recounts their odyssey and reveals the immense wealth of this natural laboratory. Straddling France, Italy, and Switzerland, the Mont Blanc massif was formed 240 million years ago. Four times the size of Paris, it covers 400 km2. Its summit, the highest in Western Europe, rises to 4,810 meters. Three scientists begin its ascent: Martine Rebetez, a Swiss climatologist; Étienne Klein, a philosopher and physicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission; and Jacques-Marie Bardintzeff, a geologist and volcanologist. Advancing in two roped teams, they are accompanied by Jean-Franck Charlet and François-Régis Thévenet, mountain guides, as well as physiologist Hugo Nespoulet.

78 days: A Tree Planting Documentary

Tree planting is one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs in Canada. Working long days in the baking sun of desolate clear cuts, you can expect rain storms and snow covered tents: that's tree planting in Northern Alberta. In this documentary, veteran planters share their experiences as they struggle through each day of what has become the longest and most difficult season ever!

A Life on the Farm

A strange story from Somerset, England about a filmmaking farmer and the inspiring legacy of his long-lost home movies.

The Forest

The story of a brilliant ecologist with a plan to save the world by restoring the planet's forests. His original work was hijacked by corporations and politicians with disastrous effect. Now he's using science to fight back.

Ruptures

Their destiny was well mapped out: brilliant studies, the promise of a good job and a big salary. However, nothing happened as planned. Aurélie, Maxime, Hélène, Emma, or Romain are graduates of Polytechnique, Sciences Po, Centrale or business schools. They have made a radical choice: to give up the future they were promised for a life they consider more compatible with the environmental and societal issues of our time. This film tells their story. For a year, the young director Arthur Gosset, himself a student at Centrale Nantes, followed the journey of six young people, their sometimes difficult decisions, their often painful breaks and their courageous choice to live in accordance with their convictions, whatever the cost. Discover the documentary that tells their story.

Tides

Filmed at Masonboro Island, an undeveloped barrier island in southeastern North Carolina, “Tides” contemplates the liminal space between the modern technological world and that more ecological dimension we label as “nature” or “the environment.”

Surviving Progress

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

SKATEPARK

No one has ever seen a skateboarder at this Loiret skatepark. At first glance, this place away from the village is deserted. But if you hang around for a long time, you enter the kingdom of adolescents, an empire without adults where relationships are made and broken with the rhythm of the seasons.

Warrior Women

Through the figure of Lakota activist and community organizer Madonna Thunder Hawk, this inspiring film traces the untold story of countless Native American women struggling for their people's civil rights. Spanning several decades, Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle's documentary charts Thunder Hawk's lifelong commitment, from her early involvement in the American Indian Movement (AIM), to her pivotal role in the founding of Women of All Red Nations, to her heartening presence at Standing Rock alongside thousands protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. She passed her dedication and hunger for change to her daughter Marcy, even if that often meant feeling like comrades-in-arms more than mother and child. Through rare archival material—including amazing footage of AIM's occupation of Wounded Knee—and an Indigenous style of circular storytelling, Warrior Women rekindles the memories and legacy of the Red Power movement's matriarchs.

The Most Unknown

An epic documentary film that sends nine scientists to extraordinary parts of the world to uncover unexpected answers to some of humanity’s biggest questions. How did life begin? What is time? What is consciousness? How much do we really know? By introducing researchers from diverse backgrounds for the first time, then dropping them into new, immersive field work they previously hadn’t tackled, the film pushes the boundaries of how science storytelling is approached. What emerges is a deeply human trip to the foundations of discovery and a powerful reminder that the unanswered questions are the most crucial ones to pose. Directed by Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Ian Cheney and advised by world-renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog, The Most Unknown is an ambitious look at a side of science never before shown on screen.

Square Fieldwork

Milah van Zuilen, visual artist and forest ecologist in training, uses the square to deal with the habit of people to construct nature. Square Fieldwork is filmed in the Bohemian forest in the Czech Republic and the concrete structure of Barendrecht, The Netherlands.

Kangaroo Valley

Journey to a secret valley in Australia, where a nervous baby kangaroo named Mala faces hungry dingoes and winter snows in this coming-of-age adventure.

Julien, le marais et la libellule

Plot unavailable

Werner We Love You

When Werner Herzog was still a child, his father was beaten to death before his eyes. His mother was overwhelmed with his upbringing and thereupon shipped him off to one of the toughest youth welfare institutions in Freistatt. This was followed by a career as a bouncer in the city's most notorious music club and an attempt to start a family. Today, the 77-year-old from Bielefeld lives with his dog Lucky in a lonely house in the country. Despite adverse living conditions, he has survived in his own unique and inimitable way.

Islands of Creation

In the jungles of the Solomon Islands, a remote archipelago in the South Pacific, a biologist is attempting to do something Charles Darwin and Ernst Mayr never accomplished: catch evolution in the act of creating new species. Albert Uy is on the verge of an amazing discovery in the Solomon Islands, but there's a threat looming on the horizon. The islands' resources are being exploited, putting all local wildlife at risk. It's a race against time to gather the evidence necessary to prove the existence of a new species before it's lost forever.

Outro Fogo

A sensory record of the relationships of affinity and enmity with fire in the conservation of the Cerrado biome. In the company of local residents hired to act as brigadiers and, more recently, as management agents, the short film explores the affections established with fire in the midst of combat pyrophobias and management pyrophilias. In addition to documenting fire fighting and manipulation techniques, the cinematographic experiment points to a more than human visual anthropology, where environmental forces such as heat, vegetation and wind make up an alterity whose condition remains ambiguous.

Between Earth & Sky

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.

Bachar à la ZAD

Plot unavailable

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

Filmmaker Marshall Curry explores the inner workings of the Earth Liberation Front, a revolutionary movement devoted to crippling facilities involved in deforestation, while simultaneously offering a profile of Oregon ELF member Daniel McGowan, who was brought up on terrorism charges for his involvement with the radical group.

Thomas Pesquet : Objectif France

Plot unavailable

Rice People

Even in the push and pull era which is full of flour and sugar, rice firmly protects the table of the rice bowl nation! There are farmers who grow the rice in different ways. Nam Ho-hyeon, a young farmer who continues his father's family business, challenges farming with agricultural drones that spray coated rice seeds in large quantities, but new technologies that seemed to bring a rosy future leave only endless homework in a series of trials and errors. Lee Geun, an urban farmer who started farming on weekends and fell in love with farming, lives a life of small farmers who touch and cultivate them with their hands rather than machines, and studies and protects the world of traditional native rice that has disappeared in history. Our rice, which grows with sincerity, is filled with happiness, and conveys the power of life presented by nature for a long time! The moving journey begins now!

North by Current

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

Hummingbirds: Jewelled Messengers

David Attenborough narrates this close up look at these tiny pollinators captured in flight as never before. Acrobats of the air - flying jewels - iridescent partners of countless plants: hummingbirds are amongst the most remarkable creatures on our planet.

When Elephants Were Young

A young man and his young elephant street beg in gritty Bangkok amid the controversial elephant business that threatens their survival, until the opportunity comes to release the elephant to the wild.

A Life's Work

What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question.

The Trouble with Wolves

Death threats, court battles, and an iconic endangered species in middle, The Trouble With Wolves takes an up close look at the most heated and controversial wildlife conservation debate of our time. The film aims to find out whether coexistence is really possible by hearing from the people directly involved.

Cowboys: A Documentary Portrait

Told in the cinematic tradition of classic westerns, “COWBOYS - A Documentary Portrait” is a feature-length film that gives viewers the opportunity to ride alongside modern working cowboys on some of America's largest and most remote cattle ranches. The movie documents the lives of the men and women working on these "big outfit" ranches - some of which are over one million acres - and still require full crews of horseback mounted workers to tend large herds of cattle. Narrated through first-hand accounts from the cowboys themselves, the story is steeped in authenticity and explores the rewards and hardships of a celebrated but misunderstood way of life, including the challenges that lie ahead for the cowboys critical to providing the world's supply of beef. “COWBOYS” was filmed on eight of the nation’s largest cattle ranches across ten states in the American West.

Sustainable

This film weaves together expert analysis of America's food and farming system with a powerful narrative of one extraordinary farmer who is determined to create a sustainable future for his community.

Holy Shit

What happens to the food we digest after it leaves our body? Is it waste that is thrown away or a resource that can be reused? In search of answers, director Rubén Abruña embarks on an investigative and entertaining search through 16 cities on four continents. He follows the trail of feces from the long sewers of Paris to a huge sewage treatment plant in Chicago.

The Basement

The village of Yahidne in northern Ukraine is coming back to life. Dogs are running around. Gardens and crops are green again. People support one another and families have reunited. In a movement of solidarity, local youth help rebuild what was devastated a year ago when Russian troops occupied the village imprisoning the villagers in the school’s basement for a month. The villagers’ attitudes alternate between their desire to move forward an remembering the horrors of the past. A heartwarming tribute to resilience and unity.

Seaspiracy

Passionate about ocean life, a filmmaker sets out to document the harm that humans do to marine species — and uncovers an alarming global conspiracy.