Environmental Studies

An immersive, visually stunning portrait of a childhood on the margins of society by Emmy-nominated director Aaron Schock, La Laguna documents the remarkable journey undertaken by a Mayan adolescent as he tries to navigates the changing world around him in the endangered rainforests of southern Mexico.

A rare and thorough look at the earth’s largest salt flat, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, Salero is a poetic journey through the eyes of one of the last remaining salt gatherers. This secluded region is thrust into the future when Bolivia embarks on a plan to extract a precious mineral from the Salar and to build an infrastructure that will connect it to the modern world.

A complex tale of social justice, urban forestry and community politics, City of Trees portrays the struggles of a DC non-profit to challenge the cycle of poverty and violence in blighted urban areas by implementing an ambitious "green jobs" program that hires 150 unemployed residents to plant trees in underserved parks.

Featuring stunning macroscopic time-lapse footage, The Creeping Garden is an award winning documentary that takes us deep into the world of slime mold and explores the work of fringe scientists, mycologists and artists who love it.

A kaleidoscopic study of the recent oil boom in North Dakota, Deep Time is an award winning documentary that focuses on the impact the fossil fuel business has on the environment and on how it affects local landowners, state officials and the Indigenous Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. A complex take on a timely issue by the director of Crude Independence.

A master of the essay film, Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood) surveys the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura - winner of his profession's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize - whose astonishing, often-controversial projects embrace decay, the passage of time, local history, and nature.

A singular appreciation of waste processing " graceful, mesmeric, almost balletic " Single Stream plunges viewers into the steady flow of a materials recycling facility where hundreds of tons of refuse are sorted each day. Yet another revelatory documentary from Harvard"s Sensory Ethnography Lab Single Stream locates the beauty, efficiency and futurism of an industry built on our culture of excess.

In northeastern China, the Songhua River has for generations served as a vital center – for leisure, commerce, and most importantly, drinking water – for the people of Harbin. Filmed only one year after a major chemical spill in its waters, Songhua depicts the enduring and complex relationship between the city’s residents and their "mother river," and considers the environmental implications of the waterway’s condition.

A compelling, thought-provoking documentary, F*ck for Forest explores a unique form of modern environmental activism where sexual liberation merges with global altruism. This critically acclaimed film follows several members of the eponymous organization as they raise money for struggling indigenous tribes in the Amazon by distributing home-made erotic films on the internet.

Featuring extensive interviews, rare photographs and archival footage, this is a fascinating, candid portrait of Dennis Banks ("Nowa Cumig" in Ojibwe), co-founder of the American Indian Movement. The film chronicles the history of the American Indian Movement, from the Custer Trail to Wounded Knee to the Longest Walk.

On a remote archipelago in the Pacific Northwest, an uncommon abundance of animal and vegetable life has sustained the Haida people for countless generations. Following traditional food harvesters as they gather and prepare for the winter, Survival Prayer is an intimate ethnographic portrait of an indigenous community and the conditions - environmental and man-made - that threaten their way of life.

For hundreds of years, the acoustic guitar has been made from the same species of Spruce. Today, due to an extreme logging practice known as clear-cutting, this tree is in danger of disappearing - and with it, the acoustic guitar. In this captivating documentary, owners of the top guitar makers unite with Greenpeace and travel to the largest forest in the US to meet with Native American landowners in the hope of finding a sustainable solution.