Forced Renewables

Click for full movie details & trailers.

Together, the three Bertrand brothers work their farm in a small Savoyard village. In 1972, they took the enormous risk to invest in the construction of an ultra modern stable for 82 milk cows. With modern organisation, they hoped to lead a better life. Almost 30 years later, the farm is successful. Their work is meticulous and the milk is graded top quality. The human cost is much more sombre. Indeed these thirty years can be summarised in one word : work. The brothers are bachelors and – each one now over sixty years old – a bitterness when they recall their past. The younger brother says it himself: "It's an economic success, but it's a human failure...".

As the international consumption of quinoa rises. The Mother Grain looks at how this increasing demand is affecting quinoa farmers. Bear Witness Pictures traveled to the Bolivian quinoa-growing communities surrounding the world's largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni, witnessing their lives first-hand to tell the story of quinoa from the perspective of the farmers themselves.

With the expansion of mining activities in Jharkhand, indigenous populations are at massive risk in terms of displacement and loss of livelihood. Especially, tribal women have been on the receiving end of economic and political marginalisation and invisible patriarchy. Through this film, we witness that tribal women’s bodies are testimony to their respective labour. These bodies narrate history, anecdotes, and advice for the future. Their identities hold powerful stories, absent in the mainstream.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

The Danube Delta in Romania - the 'Last European Sanctuary’ - is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While major efforts are made to protect biodiversity, the plight of local communities is largely overlooked. Social scientists claim that the traumatic nature of the swamp bears heavy on the villagers' lives. But is Nature really to blame? Swamp Dialogues is based on an extensive field-research in the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. Through a careful ‘argument montage’ built entirely on cinematic language the film represents an anthropological analysis formulated in image and sound.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

In a decaying Soviet-era retirement home, a vibrant group of elders cling to life by staging Shakespeare. Yet loneliness lingers beyond the theater’s doors, until drama begins to blur with reality.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

Today, against a backdrop of sharply increasing demand, growth in the world population and the growing impact of an unsettled climate, water has become one of the most precious natural resources of our planet.

If the ice sheet covering Greenland melted, global sea levels would rise 21 feet, profoundly impacting our planet. How, why, and when could this happen? A few years ago, scientists found lost sediment from a secret sub-ice Cold War base in the Arctic from the 1960s that holds clues to a time when Greenland Ice Sheet was gone. The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice is an hour-long documentary about the discovery of this sediment and the critical implications of the science to our future. The finding that the ice sheet melted in the past completely transforms our understanding of the stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

A film about life in the Czech borderlands after the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.

After finding some videos she uploaded to YouTube when she was a child, Manuela attempts to follow the trail she herself has left on the Internet. A search that looks into all that things that won't never die and that, especially, thinks about the way we look at ourselves.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

This short documentary includes three vignettes about life off the coast of Newfoundland. In Island of Birds, we visit Green Island, a sea bird sanctuary where puffins frolic. In Caplin Harvest, little silvery fish called caplin spawn by washing ashore along the waves, making an easy catch for fishermen. In Outports on the Move, off-shore houses are pried loose from their foundation and floated to the Newfoundland mainland, where schools, hospitals, stores and services are available to the community.

In Casablanca, a group of filmmakers conduct discussions with people about their expectations of, and aspirations for, the emerging Moroccan national cinema. When a disgruntled worker kills his superior accidentally, their inquest shifts focus, and they begin to probe the motives of the killing.

Poliske was contaminated with radioactive material after the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. Soviet authorities did everything they could to erase the ancient history of this town, and after Chornobyl, they destroyed its future.

A story about the environmental conflict between GM soy growers and Maya Beekeepers in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It reflects on what the environment and economy could look like if bee health was considered as a criterion of sustainable development. The film explores the pre-colonial and ongoing relationship between Maya people and their environment, in particular the milpa agricultural system (and its main crop, maize), sacred sinkholes (called cenotes), and sacred stingless bees, the Melipona.

The forest is like an organism, ancient and full of mechanisms. Its plants need water and are temperature-dependent. Nevertheless, it survives in a wide variety of locations around the world. How does it manage to adapt to even the most adverse conditions?