Movies: Indigenous rights

The Australian Aborigines (in this film anyway) believe that this is the place where the green ants go to dream, and that if their dreams are disturbed, it will bring down disaster on us all. The Aborigines' belief is not shared by a giant mining com...

In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, sets the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness....

For centuries, Inuit in the Arctic have lived on and around the frozen ocean. Now, as climate change is rapidly melting the sea ice between Canada and Greenland, the outside world sees unprecedented opportunity. Oil and gas deposits, faster shipping ...

Initially embarking on an unplanned personal filmmaking project, Ilias Boukhemoucha finds himself drawn to the overlooked corners and marginalized communities within Canadian cities....

A jailed activist is bailed out by her brother, who happens to be involved with the very land development she was protesting....

This short documentary revisits Mi’kmaq territory, where an iconic moment was captured in 2013—igniting into a symbol of Indigenous resistance and halting fracking exploration on unceded lands....

Mauri (life principle, life force, vital essence inherent in all living things) The film is an intimate, visually stunning testament to a land and a people who have survived removal, exploitation and colonization — and to the healing ways that are p...

The 6 Guarani villages of Jaraguá, in São Paulo, fight for land rights, for human rights and for the preservation of nature. They suffer from the proximity to the city, which brings lack of resources, pollution of rivers and springs, racism, police v...

Combining ecological imperatives, unique land narratives, cultural folklore, ancestral agricultural traditions, and farming practices side by side using a dual-channel video projection aims to explore how ecological concerns in disparate contexts can...

Australia was colonized in the late 1700s. Pemulwuy, a man of the Bidjigal tribes — from the region that is today modern-day Sydney — led a 12-year resistance against British settlers moving into his people’s traditional lands....

In this era of “reconciliation”, Indigenous land is still being taken at gunpoint. Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation are standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence ag...

"A documentary film which looks at the issue of British Columbia Native land claims and how the aboriginals link their culture to the land, which has been stolen by the dominant white culture of North America. In the film, the argument is presented t...

A Sámi woman fights for her right to claim a tax deduction against the purchase of a dog. Why the Swedish authorities fail to recognize the dog's use as a reindeer herding tool versus a pet opens up a larger discussion about Indigenous rights and eco...

In the face of AAPI violence, an intergenerational coalition of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, People of Color organizers come together to organize a march across historic Washington Heights and Harlem, as a continuation of the historic and radica...

This film follows the aftermath of the Oka crisis, which brought Indigenous rights into sharp focus. After the barricades came down, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was created, and travelled to more than 100 communities and heard from mor...

The film follows Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martinez and Kade L. Twist, who put land art in a tribal context. The group bring together a community to construct the Repellent Fence, a two-m...

Promised Land is a social justice documentary that follows two tribes in the Pacific Northwest: the Duwamish and the Chinook, as they fight for the restoration of treaty rights they've long been denied. In following their story, the film examines a l...

“Can I be nostalgic about something I’ve never experienced?” asks debut filmmaker Pranami Koch. She has in mind her grandmother, a person she never knew who belonged to the Koches, a people in India with their own culture and traditions. In her searc...

This Peabody Award-winning documentary from New Mexico PBS looks at the European arrival in the Americas from the perspective of the Pueblo Peoples....

In 1953 the Canadian government relocated Inuit families from Northern Québec to the High Arctic, promising an abundance of game and fish and assuring them they could return home after two years if things didn't work out. They would not see their anc...