Arctic Song (2022)

The Mountain of SGaana

As a young fisherman cruises along a rugged shoreline, a tiny mouse in Haida regalia appears and starts to knit a blanket. A story unfolds on the blanket as it grows longer, illustrating the ancient tale of Haida master sea hunter Naa-Naa-Simgat and his beloved, Kuuga Kuns. When a SGaana (the Haida word for “killer whale”) captures the hunter and drags him down into a supernatural world, the courageous Kuuga Kuns sets off to save him. Will the lovers manage to escape the undersea Mountain of SGaana, or will they, too, become part of the Haida spirit world forever?

Neige

On the eve of summer vacation, Prune leaves her parents for the traditional "end-of-year school trip." But once she's gone, an incredible snowstorm hits the small town where her family lives. Philémon, her younger brother, then makes an astonishing discovery: an Inuit family has settled on a roundabout. The meeting of these two worlds sets the stage for a wonderful adventure.

Way of Giants

In a forest of giant trees, six-year-old Oquirá embarks on a quest to understand life.

The Shaman's Apprentice

A young shaman must face her first test: a trip underground to visit Kannaaluk, The One Below, who holds the answers to why a community member has become ill.

Le grand solstice

Plot unavailable

The Emerald Forest

For ten years, engineer Bill Markham has searched tirelessly for his son Tommy who disappeared from the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. Miraculously, he finds the boy living among the reclusive Amazon tribe who adopted him. And that's when Bill's adventure truly begins. For his son is now a grown tribesman who moves skillfully through this beautiful-but-dangerous terrain, fearful only of those who would exploit it. And as Bill attempts to "rescue" him from the savagery of the untamed jungle, Tommy challenges Bill's idea of true civilization and his notions about who needs rescuing.

The Mission

When a Spanish Jesuit goes into the South American wilderness to build a mission in the hope of converting the Indians of the region, a slave hunter is converted and joins his mission. When Spain sells the colony to Portugal, they are forced to defend all they have built against the Portuguese aggressors.

The Lost Children

After a plane crash, four indigenous children fight to survive in the Colombian Amazon using ancestral wisdom as an unprecedented rescue mission unfolds.

Documentário Brasil Tupinambá

Plot unavailable

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

A few decades after the destruction of the Inca Empire, a Spanish expedition led by the infamous Aguirre leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon River in search of the lost city of El Dorado. When great difficulties arise, Aguirre’s men start to wonder whether their quest will lead them to prosperity or certain death.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy

Follow filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as she creates an intimate portrait of her community and the impacts of the substance use and overdose epidemic. Witness the change brought by community members with substance-use disorder, first responders and medical professionals as they strive for harm reduction in the Kainai First Nation.

Seeds

A Mohawk woman is hired as a social media influencer but gets caught in a deadly cat-and-mouse game, as she's forced to go to war to preserve her people's heritage from corporate interests.

Spirit of Itchi

XIX century. A big misfortune happened on the land of one wealthy family in Yakutia. As time passed, fear was forgotten and farmers started settling here again. But ghosts of this land will reveal secrets of forgotten history.

Birdwatchers

Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the present. When a young Guarani-Kaiowá woman commits suicide, Nádio leads his community to form a protest camp on the borders of a local farm that sits on their ancestral burial ground.

Soldier Blue

After a cavalry group is massacred by the Cheyenne, only two survivors remain: Honus, a naive private devoted to his duty, and Cresta, a young woman who had lived with the Cheyenne two years and whose sympathies lie more with them than with the US government. Together, they must try to reach the cavalry's main base camp. As they travel onward, Honus is torn between his growing affection for Cresta.

In the Beginning was Water and Sky

A haunting and visually stunning fairytale that blends the horrors of fantasy and the real life historical events of colonization and Indian Boarding Schools in the United States. A Native American girl in the 1700s and a Native American boy in the 1960s struggle to find their way back to a home that may be lost forever.

Secret of the Incas

Harry Steele (Charlton Heston) is a tourist guide determined to make his fortune by finding the Sunburst, an Inca treasure.

Cabeza de Vaca

In 1528, a Spanish expedition flounders off the coast of Florida with 600 lives lost. One survivor, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, roams across the American continent searching for his Spanish comrades. Instead, he discovers the Iguase, an ancient Indian tribe. Over the next eight years, Cabeza de Vaca learns their mystical and mysterious culture, becoming a healer and a leader. But soon this New World collides with the Old World as Spanish conquistadors seek to enslave the Indians, and Cabeza de Vaca must confront his own people and his past.

Tawai: A Voice from the Forest

Explorer Bruce Parry visits nomadic tribes in Borneo and the Amazon in hope to better understand humanity's changing relationship with the world around us.

Nose and Tina

The unusual story of Nose and Tina, 2 people in love. He is employed as a brakeman, she as a sex worker.

Fancy Dance

Following her sister's disappearance, Jax and her niece Roki must stick together. Desperate to keep what's left of their family intact, Jax and Roki defy the law and hit the road on a journey to the Grand Nation Powwow in Oklahoma City.

You Are on Indian Land

The territory of Akwesasne straddles the Canada-U.S. border. When Canadian authorities prohibited the duty-free cross-border passage of personal purchases - a right established by the Jay Treaty of 1794 - Kanien'kéhaka protesters blocked the international bridge between Ontario and New York State.

Seven Songs from the Tundra

An anthology of stories about the indigenous Nenet peoples of the Northern Russian tundra, and how their way of life was disrupted by the advent of Soviet power.

Povo da Floresta

Plot unavailable

The Pearl Button

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

Powwow Highway

Two Northern Cheyenne men take a road trip from Montana to New Mexico to bail out the sister of one of them who has been framed and arrested in Santa Fe. On the way, they begin to reconnect to their spiritual heritage.

Deep Roots

Lonnie Kauk’s personal journey to honor his indigenous Yosemite roots, and to connect with his legendary father by repeating his iconic climbs.

Tunniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos

Inuit traditional face tattoos have been forbidden for a century, and almost forgotten. Director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, together with long-time friend and activist Aaju Peter, is determined to uncover the mystery and meaning behind this beautiful ancient tradition. Together they embark on an adventure through Arctic communities, speaking with elders and recording the stories of a once popularized female artform. Central to the film is Arnaquq-Baril’s personal debate over whether or not to get tattood herself. With candour and humour, she welcomes us into her world, to experience firsthand the complex emotions that accompany her struggle. Past meets present in this intimate account of one woman’s journey towards self-empowerment and cultural understanding.

Embrace of the Serpent

The epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.

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.

Eami

Eami means ‘forest’ in Ayoreo. It also means ‘world’. The story happens in the Paraguayan Chaco, the territory with the highest deforestation rate in the world. 25,000 hectares of forest are being deforested a month in this territory which would mean an average of 841 hectares a day or 35 hectares per hour. The forest barely lives and this only due to a reserve that the Totobiegosode people achieved in a legal manner. They call Chaidi this place which means ancestral land or the place where we always lived and it is part of the "Ayoreo Totobiegosode Natural and Cultural Heritage". Before this, they had to live through the traumatic situation of leaving the territory behind and surviving a war. It is the story of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, told from the point of view of Asoja, a bird-god with the ability to bring an omniscient- temporal gaze, who becomes the narrator of this story developed in a crossing between documentary and fiction.