The Global Environmental Justice Documentaries collection includes the following films:

Five short films from Indigenous communities across Indonesia show their response to threats to their forests posed by miners, loggers, palm oil plantations and global warming. In the sixth film a Dayak Iban community inspires hope as it offers a simple solution to the global climate crisis.

 

West Papua, the "Amazon of Asia" is a vast tropical rainforest that has been occupied for  25,000 years.  The Dani and the Asmat people have lived in spiritual harmony with the land for millennia. Now they are threatened by Indonesia's policy of assimilation and the destruction of their lands.

Part I. The residents of the ancient Chinese cities of Fengjie clash with officials forcing them to evacuate their homes -- along with millions of other residents -- to make way for the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

Part II. Yan Yu follows up his first film with Before the Flood II, a profile of the residents of Gongtan, a 1700-year-old village soon to be demolished and flooded during the construction of Three Gorges dams and reservoir.

Director Wang Jiuliang traces the flow of garbage from his apartment to hundreds of toxic and illegal dumps grazed by sheep and plowed under by developers on the expanding edge of Beijing. He also discovers a determined community of scavengers who live in the wastelands.

Award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger tracks the lives of Louisiana residents living in the aftermath of the largest offshore oil spill in American history.

Blood and Gold: Inside Burma’s Hidden War explores the intensification of violence as a cease-fire collapses and a civil war flares up between Burma’s government military forces and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in the country’s Kachin State.

* New title added January 2023 *
If Not Us Then Who?  Film 6 of 7 

400,000 women harvest the nuts of the babassu palm, which is used to produce soap, oil, bread, charcoal,and cosmetics, providing them a modest living. When access to the trees was denied, a movement began.

* New title added January 2023 *

If Not Us Then Who?  Film 2 of 7 
Kynan Tegar, a young Indigenous filmmaker, documents a cultural revival and the consruction of a traditional longhouse for the first time in 50 years.

The journey of Derrick Evans, a Boston teacher who moves home to coastal Mississippi when the graves of his ancestors are bulldozed to make way for the sprawling city of Gulfport.

* New title added January 2023 *

Judith Helfand investigates a tragic 1995 heat wave in which 739 citizens died, most of them poor,elderly, and African American. Behind the shocking headlines she finds, a “slow-motion disaster” fueled by poverty, economics, social isolation, and racism.

This compelling documentary places Myanmar's Myitsone Dam in the context of the Kachin insurgency which has ravaged the country for more than five decades in the struggle for control the region’s rich resources.

Death By Design: The Dirty Secret of our Digital Addiction investigates the electronics industry and reveals how even the smallest devices have deadly environmental and health costs.

* New title added January 2023 *

If Not Us Then Who?  Film 3 of 7 
Kynan Tegar, a young Indigenous filmmaker, defends the long-established use of controlled burning in sustainable farming in his Sungai Utik village in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

 

* New title added January 2023 *

An exploration of the environmental movement, including grassroots and global activism, spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change.

In the Areng valley in southwest Cambodia  members  of the Chong community, supported by Buddhist monks, oppose the construction of a dam that would flood their forest homeland. In Lost World sand mining on Cambodia's west coast undermines the mangrove forests ecosystem that supports a local fishery and a communal way of life.

For nearly a century, industrial farming has unleashed ecologically destructive ways of growing food across the planet, affecting economies, cultures, health, and biodiversity. This film highlights aspirational but achievable methods to create “natural farms” in this thought-provoking journey through Japan, Korea, and the United States.

Spotlights the alarming global rise of mercury pollution of air, water, and soil as well as severe disabilities, diseases, and death attributed to mercury poisoning in developing communities involved in small-scale gold mining, one of the major sources of mercury pollution worldwide.

* New title added January 2023 *

If Not Us Then Who?  Film 4 of 7 

Indonesian Indigenous youth, aware of global warming and concerned about the future, return from the cities to their villages with plans for reforestation, organic farming and cultural revival.

The stories of five remarkable Native American activists in four communities who are fighting to protect Indian lands against disastrous environmental hazards, preserving their sovereignty and ensuring the cultural survival of their peoples.

Demonstrates that it is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems, to restore ecosystem functions in areas where they have been lost, to fundamentally improve the lives of people who have been trapped in poverty for generations and to sequester carbon naturally.

The Last Mountain documents the struggles of a small West Virginia community fighting to preserve Coal River Mountain from mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining and to expose the impact of the coal industry on their lives and health.

Documents a remarkable paradigm shift: the rebirth of a self-sustaining ecosystem in the dry and remote Loess Plateau region of China.

In central Beijing, a small but ambitious environmental NGO is calling on major international corporations including Apple, Walmart and Hugo Boss to take responsibility for suppliers who are fouling China's air and water as they produce goods for Western consumers.

A New Moon Over Tohoku is a moving story of love, survival, and Japanese tradition in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in northeastern Japan. film chronicles the healing journey of both the Canadian-Japanese filmmaker and the Japanese residents affected by the disaster as  Tohoku residents speak out for the first time, breaking away from their cultural silence to share their own stories.

Featuring stunning footage from seven winters in the Arctic, People of a Feather takes us through time into the world of the Inuit in the northern reaches of Canada.

Reveals the unsafe conditions in which adults and children alike toil, as they seek to eke out a basic living by processing toxic plastic waste products.

If time is short these four excerpts from Plastic China could be assigned for viewing or shown in class.  Total running time is 35 minutes.
 

Sheds light on basic and fundamental challenges people face in the effort to eat, make a living, and have a meaningful family life amid Cambodia’s changing economic and environmental landscapes.

Host Mark Angelo documents the profound and alarming impact of textile factories serving the fast fashion industry in Western countries, on rivers in Bangladesh, China, India, and Indonesia. Leading clothing designers propose more sustainable methods.

Journalist Liu Jianqiang and conservation biologist Lü Zhi discover a new way of looking at environmental conservation on the Tibetan Plateau where Buddhist monks and villagers have preserved vast tracts of land for centuries.

An intimate portrait of a community battling against environmental pollution from Texas oil refineries and petrochemical plants.

From the rainforests of Papua New Guinea to Canada’s tar sands, Standing on Sacred Ground: Profit and Loss exposes industrial threats to native peoples’ health, livelihood, and cultural survival.

* New title added January 2023 *

If Not Us Then Who?  Film 1 of 7 
Kynan Tegar, a young local filmmaker describes a 20-year campaign to win recognition of the community's Indigenous rights.

* New title added January 2023 *

If Not Us Then Who?  Film 5 of 7

Costa Rica works with Indigenous communities to monitor, protect and restore forests.

The story of the worst environmental disaster you've never heard of in northeastern Oklahoma. What was once the Quapaw Tribe’s reservation was taken and transformed into one of the largest lead and zinc mines on the planet. Today, Tar Creek is home to 40 square miles of environmental devastation, and its residents are fighting for environmental justice.

Kisilu Musya, a Kenyan subsistence farmer, climate change fighter and video diarist collborates with Julia Dahr, a Norwegian filmmaker, on this award-winning documentary about the human cost of climate change.

Showcases some of the ecological, social, and public health crises resulting from the thriving leather industry in northern India.

* New title added January 2023 *

If Not Us Then Who?  Film 7 of 7

A leader of the Babassu movement reflects on the central place of the babassu industry in the protection of women, culture, the forests, and the Amazon as a whole.

An investigative look into the environmental costs of the fast fashion industry, from production—and the life of low wage workers in developing countries—to its after-effects such as river and soil pollution, pesticide contamination, disease and death.

This daring documentary by Chai JIng a former reporter for China Central Television investigates the deadly fog that hung over China's cities. Initially supported by officials it was quickly banned when it was releaseed, but not before 200 million viewers had seen it.

Seen through the eyes of activists, farmers, and journalists, Waking the Green Tiger follows an extraordinary, unprecedented, and successful campaign to stop a huge dam project on the upper Yangtze river in the high mountains of southwestern China. 

Yindabad is a poignant chronicle of the dynamic struggles of the displaced indigenous peoples living by the Narmada River in India.

* New title added January 2023 *

Filmmaker Slater Jewell-Kemker was just 15 when she began documenting the untold stories of youth on the front lines of climate change who are refusing to let their futures slip away and are rising up to shape the world they will live in.