Research Guides: Streaming Video Individual Titles: Docuseek

Global Environmental Justice Collection of 46 films

All videos are linked through WVC Library's One Search catalog. Click over the icon button after each title for a summary.

5x5: Voices of Change from the Forests of Indonesia 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.
Arrows Against the Wind 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.
Before the Flood Part I 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.
Before the Flood Part II 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.
Beijing Besieged By Waste 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.
Black Tide: Voices from the Gulf 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 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.
Brazil's Women Warriors 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.
Building a Longhouse as a Cultural Center 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.
Come Hell or High Water 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.
Cooked: Survival by Zip Code 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.
Death By Design 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.
The Dyak Iban Way of Farming 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.
A Fierce Green Fire An exploration of the environmental movement, including grassroots and global activism, spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change.
Fight for Areng Valley + Lost World 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.
Final Straw 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.
Gold's Lethal Toll in Indonesia 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.
Homecoming: Indigenous youth return to the land 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.
Homeland 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.
Hope in a Changing Climate 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 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.
Lessons of the Loess Plateau Documents a remarkable paradigm shift: the rebirth of a self-sustaining ecosystem in the dry and remote Loess Plateau region of China.
Lifting the Veil on Polluters in 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 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.
People of a Feather 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.
Plastic China 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.
A River Changes Course 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.
RiverBlue 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.
Searching for Sacred Mountain 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.
Shelter in Place An intimate portrait of a community battling against environmental pollution from Texas oil refineries and petrochemical plants.
Standing on Sacred Ground: Profit and Loss 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.
Sungal Utik: The Fight for Recognition 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.
Sustainable Forests in Costa Rica Costa Rica works with Indigenous communities to monitor, protect and restore forests.
Tar Creek 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.
Thank You for the Rain 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.
The Toxic Price of Leather in India Showcases some of the ecological, social, and public health crises resulting from the thriving leather industry in northern India.
A Tribute to Dona Dije 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.
The True Cost 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.
Under the Dome 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 released, but not before 200 million viewers had seen it.
Waking the Green Tiger 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 Yindabad is a poignant chronicle of the dynamic struggles of the displaced indigenous peoples living by the Narmada River in India.
Youth Unstoppable 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.

Other Films

Abortion: Add to Cart ABORTION: ADD TO CART is a documentary exploring self-managed abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol and the emergence of telehealth. This short film examines the marketplace circumventing regulations to provide abortion pills over the internet. The film features two storytellers, Alice and Ari, who share their self-managed abortion experiences. Alice self-managed her abortion through Aid Access, a Dutch organization. Conversely, Ari, a trans-masculine non-binary storyteller, recalls a self-managed abortion experience before these resources were available. The film spotlights various organizations such as Plan C and If/When/How, who support those looking to self-manage. Doctors weigh in on the abortion pill and FDA regulations that prevent it from becoming widely available. ABORTION: ADD TO CART also investigates the emergence of telehealth, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what the future of abortion looks like.
Black Girl in Suburbia For many Black girls raised in the suburbs, the experiences of going to school, playing on the playground, and living day-to-day life can be uniquely alienating. BLACK GIRL IN SUBURBIA looks at the suburbs of America from the perspective of women of color. Filmmaker Melissa Lowery shares her own childhood memories of navigating racial expectations both subtle and overt-including questions like, "Hey, I just saw a Black guy walking down the street; is that your cousin?" Through conversations with her own daughters, with teachers and scholars who are experts in the personal impacts of growing up a person of color in a predominately white place, this film explores the conflicts that many Black girls in homogeneous hometowns have in relating to both white and Black communities. BLACK GIRL IN SUBURBIA is a great discussion starter for Freshman orientation week and can be used in a wide variety of educational settings including classes in sociology, race relations, African American Studies, Women's Studies, and American Studies.
In Her Words Narrated by LGBTQ+ historian Lillian Faderman and illuminated through interviews with trailblazers like Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina), and Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet), In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction charts a literary journey from post-war lesbian pulp to modern bestsellers. Highlighting the successful and controversial, directors Lisa Marie Evans and Marianne K. Martin skillfully delve into stories that defined eras of lesbian writers, and the changing socio-political landscapes that encouraged an evolution of the genre. In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction pays loving tribute to this evolution of lesbian and queer fiction, told through a lens of broader American history. Starting in 1928, readers fell into The Well of Loneliness — a groundbreaking lesbian novel, albeit a tragic one. By the late 1990s, lesbian fiction had climbed out of the well and into a diverse world of stories and storytellers who were publishing increasingly multifaceted stories (some of them even happy ones). This film will inspire lit lovers of any age to return to old favorites, while igniting curiosity for a new literary tryst or two.
Let Them Eat Dirt Allergies, obesity, asthma, diabetes, auto-immune and intestinal disorders are all on the rise, with the incidence of some diseases doubling every ten years. New research points to changes in the ecosystem of microbes that live on and inside every one of us -- our microbiomes -- as a major cause. But how could one's gut microbes increase the odds of developing conditions as radically different as asthma and diabetes? Hosted by Good Morning America's Becky Worley, and based on the book of the same name by B. Brett Finlay, PhD and Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD, LET THEM EAT DIRT features families, doctors, and researchers who are sleuthing out what's harming our microbes -- and what we can do to reverse this dangerous trend.
Nature's Cleanup Crew To us, it's garbage. To them, it's dinner. There are some busy scavengers who live among us-- crafty critters who share our cities and recycle the mountains of food waste our messy society leaves behind. Vultures, ants, foxes, opossums and others offer us many benefits, simply by sharing our space. NATURE'S CLEANUP CREW presents a cast of vital creatures, each beautiful in their own right. Without them, our waste would be piling up and we would be dealing with many deadly diseases. Through the help of thoughtful and passionate scientists who have come to understand and love these creatures, we uncover just what makes scavengers tick. Debunking some myths along the way, we learn what adaptations they have evolved for this 'messy' job, what benefits they can provide us, and how us humans can work with them so they can do their job even better.
Prism For PRISM, Belgian filmmaker An van. Dienderen invited Rosine Mbakam, from Cameroon, and Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso, to work together on a film in which the differences in their skin color, and experiences as filmmakers, serve as points-of-departure to explore this provocative question. Invented and standardized with white skin in mind, “the aesthetics and emulsions weren’t created for us,” the film director and actor Sylvestre Amoussou says in PRISM. And that underlying issue remains, even with digital technology: such white-centricity has meant that photographic media assume and privilege whiteness. PRISM problematizes the objectivity of the camera and its inequality of power to tackle other inequalities based on skin color as well. And as the film deconstructs these issues, the filmmakers are also trying to reconstruct, by creating in a collaborative manner, and self-consciously attempting to overcome these biases. The film consists of three sections, one by each of the directors: • Rosine’s scenes are the most personal. She wonders about how she and her family have been hurt by photography’s inability to accurately portray their skin tones. She also meets with two former film professors of hers about their focus, and the biases of the film “canon,” syllabi and curriculums. • In Eléonore’s scenes, she interviews African actress Tella Kphomahou, discussing problems she encountered with the lighting of her skin while working in Europe. They also bring Sylvestre Amoussou into their conversation to discuss his philosophy towards making films that accurately portray Black skin. • An’s scenes are more abstract. They are shot at the Belgian film school where she teaches, and in a studio where the setting evokes a “color-test” scene, with a white man and a woman of color. But the film is more than just the sum of the different visions of the directors: recorded zoom conversations are woven into the film in which the directors discuss the issues, their viewpoints, and the very making of PRISM itself. To tackle the issue of racism in Western filmmaking, PRISM takes what some see as simple technical problems, and while creating powerful counter-images and methods of working, explores their insidious personal, cultural, and historical ramifications.
Unity Mosque After having to hide their relationship while making the Hajj, Imam El-Farouk and his husband Troy co-founded Unity Mosque in Toronto, one of the world's first Queer-affirming and gender-equal mosques. Though the mosque (and filmmaker) receive threats and hate speech, the mosque forges on, playing a life-saving role in the lives of its members.
Beyond the Blues: Child and Youth Depression Statistics reveal that depression in children and youth is on the rise. In fact, it has increased by one-third in the past 30 years. Untreated depression costs a teenager in many ways: lost eductional opportunities, lost social opportunities and lost time. Through the personal stories of three young people, this compelling documentary traces the journey of depression, from early signs and symptoms, to assessment, diagnosis and treatment. The documentary also helps shatter some stereotypes. Depressed kids don't just have a bad attitude--they have an illness. And the illness is treatable.
Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror Delving into a century of genre films that by turns utilized, caricatured, exploited, sidelined, and finally embraced them, HORROR NOIRE traces a secret history of Black Americans in Hollywood through their connection to the horror genre. Adapting executive producer Robin Means Coleman’s seminal book, HORROR NOIRE will present the living and the dead, using new and archival interviews from scholars and creators; the voices who survived the genre’s past trends, to those shaping its future.
Restitution? - Africa's Fight for its Art A unique art-history saga, this film recounts the troubling story of the African artwork that fills European museums, and whose return is now being demanded by their countries of origin. Snatched up like trophies by colonizers, the works fertilized European art before acquiring recognition as universal masterpieces in their own right. But in Africa, their absence is still traumatic. Through the burning question of their possible restitution, the film invites us to reconsider both our cultural heritage and museums’ role in reinventing our relationship with Africa.