Adam Loften

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.

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.

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.

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.