Indigenous Film Festival: The Salmon Forest Project, Entropy, Ola Ka Honua
Sunday, October 13th
Ricketson Theater
6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
The Salmon Forest Project, director Bill Heath. This compelling documentary paints a vivid picture of a threatened ecosystem and those who care for it. In the vast rainforest homelands of the Heiltsuk, known as the Great Bear Rainforest, extractive industries have exploited the land, breaking the fragile links that connect thousands of species. The salmon, which create a cycle that sustains a diverse array of plant and animal life, are now in peril. The film explores the intersection between traditional knowledge systems and western science, and offers a profound meditation on what the Salmon Nations of the Pacific Northwest have known for millennia – that everything in this world is connected, and those connections are essential to life. (Bill Heath Films, 2024, 27 min.).
Entropy, director Inuk Jørgensen (Greenlandic Inuit). What happens when the ice disappears? The vast Greenlandic ice sheet has been created over thousands of years, but today climate change is threatening the close and sacred connection between the land molded by ice and the Inuit who live there. Told from an indigenous perspective, the film celebrates Greenlandic mythology as much as it laments the nature we are all losing. In English and Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), with English subtitles. (Inuks.dk, 2024, 10 min.).
Ola Ka Honua (director Jilli Rose). This visually stunning animation recounts the tragic loss of native forests in Hawai’i and the tireless efforts of The Auwahi Restoration Project to restore one of these precious watershed forests. At one time, the Hawaiian Islands were covered with diverse, watershed forests, from Mauka to Makai, that housed a kingdom of plants and birds found nowhere else on the planet. Stressed to their limits from human impacts and invasive species, Hawaiian forest faded and wavered at the edge of existence. Ola Ka Honua tells the story of the rebirthing of the Auwahi watershed forest by a human community that cared and a landowner, ‘Ulupalakua Ranch, that took an uncommon stand. (Jilli Rose, 2022, 22 min.).
With Auwahi Restoration Project Director Art Medeiros for Q&A (via Zoom).