Environmental Studies

Director Bas Devos offers another Brussels city symphony. With a quiet grace that’s becoming a trademark, he and his team capture both the longing of contemporary urban life and the potential for enchantment that still exists in spaces shared by strangers from different worlds.

Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and  Marcia Bjørnerud as guides, the film seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center.

Critic's Pick!  One of the most awarded films of 2022, Geographies of Solitude is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world filled with arresting images and made with an activist spirit. The film follows Zoe, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived Sable Island, on a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic with a rich ecosystem, for over 40 years.

A cinematic meditation of the dawn of May 3, 2020–International Dawn Chorus Day–as observed from around the world during the Covid-19 lockdown.

The Fourth Kingdom: The Kingdom of Plastics is a compassionate through-the-seasons study of a non-profit recycling and redemption center in New York.

This collection of eight early films by Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz proposes a critical reflection on the relationship between colonialism, modernity and the impending ecological disaster. At the core of the collection is a cycle of works that explore the colonial and post-colonial exchange between Europe and the Americas.

Forcefully removed from their ancestral home by the Ugandan government to protect the endangered gorilla population, the indigenous Batwa people start a music club in hopes to preserve their culture through song and story.

Zipporah was a girl when her family was among the eighty Inuit to be sent to the high arctic by the Canadian government. Through haunting interviews, archival footage and experimental animation, Resolute tells a story familiar to thousands of indigenous families in Canada and beyond.

A documentary that uses the rat to explore the complicated history of Baltimore and how racial segregation, redlining, and environmental racism built the American city we see today.

In Bolivia, the glaciers are melting. Samuel, a ski lift operator at the world’s highest elevation ski resort is seeing firsthand the effects of climate change. Generations of his family have lived and worked in the snowy mountains, but now due to unprecedented environmental changes, the snow is gone. With scientists looking for answers, Samuel turns to ancient rituals to soothe the mountain’s spirit in hopes of bringing back the snow and his way of life.

In Pursuit of Silence is a meditative exploration of our relationship with silence, sound and the impact of noise on our lives. This critically acclaimed documentary takes us on an immersive cinematic journey around theglobe.

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.