Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

The Atomic Tree is a virtual reality journey into the memories of one of the most revered trees in the world—a 400-year-old Japanese White Pine bonsai that survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima. Directed and produced by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

The Apollo 8 astronauts recount their memories of capturing the first image of Earth from space in 1968 and evokes the awe of seeing Earth framed against the blackness of space.

Silence just might be on the verge of extinction and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton believes that even the most remote corners of the globe are impacted by noise pollution. In Sanctuaries of Silence, join Hempton on an immersive listening journey into Olympic National Park, one of the quietest places in North America.

For millennia, Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain their traditional land management practices. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. As the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America's original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.

As Singapore dredges sand from beneath Cambodia's mangrove forests, an ecosystem, a communal way of life, and one woman's relationship to her beloved home are faced with the threat of erasure.

The voices of nightingales have lit up the forests of England at night every spring for thousands of years. In this film, award-winning folk singer Sam Lee draws on a lineage of traditional folk music to join the bird in spontaneous song as climate change and development threaten it with extinction in the UK.

On a remote Icelandic island, teenagers Birta and Selma take it upon themselves to counteract society's harmful impact on nature, exchanging night-time parties for nocturnal puffin rescues in a coming-of-age story for young adults and puffins alike.

For storyteller Andri Snær Magnason, climate change is like a black hole: so big, it’s larger than language. Retracing his grandparents’ annual spring journey to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier to witness the loss of Europe’s largest ice cap with his son, Andri searches for the stories that can help us understand our ecological crisis.

What if the world embodied our highest potential? What would it look like? As the structures of modern society crumble, is it enough to respond with the same tired solutions? Or are we being called to question a set of unexamined assumptions that form the very basis of our civilization? This 25-minute retrospective asks us to reflect on the state of the world and ourselves, and to listen more closely to what is being asked of us at this time of unprecedented global transformation. - Written by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Mohammed Alsaleh, a young Syrian refugee, is rebuilding his life after being granted asylum in Canada. In Vancouver, he counsels and helps resettle newly-arrived Syrian refugee families so that they may find new homes and begin again.

This short documentary tells the story of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the dictionary she created in an effort to keep her language alive.

Kanaka Maoli poet and activist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio immerses us in the concept of aloha ‘āina—a love for and of the land embodied by her poetry, her family, and the movement at the foot of Mauna Kea—as she fights to protect the sacred mountain from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.

Elemental follows three outsiders who are obsessed by nature and driven by a deep desire to change the status quo. Rajendra Singh, an Indian government official gone rogue, mounts a national crusade to save the Ganges River. Activist Eriel Deranger leads a David and Goliath fight against the oil giants who are destroying her homeland in the Canadian Tar Sands. Australian inventor, Jay Harman, is attempting to halve the world's energy consumption by mimicking natural systems. Separated by continents, each character is part of a global story about water and climate change that goes beyond the issues to reveal the public triumphs and emotional scars of life on the front line.

In the Khmer language, the root word for “nature” and “country” is cheate, meaning “taste”: to truly understand the essence of the land, one must know it through the senses. Since fleeing Cambodia with her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, and a genocide which devastated an entire culture and displaced millions of people from their homes, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. This film follows her to the landscapes of her homeland—changing through deforestation, industrialization, urbanization and development—where she has spent years tenderly documenting the disappearing, relational ways of life held within them. As she comes to know these places not only through the lens of her camera, but through the intimate relationships she forms with the landscapes and people whose stories she shares, Kalyanee awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within.

Since fleeing Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. Tenderly documenting the people and landscapes of Cambodia threatened by industrialization and development, she awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within her.