Award-Winning Films For A Sustainable Future

Illustrating the wide array of birds that live in and around the city of Toronto, the film features passionate birdwatchers who have devoted most of their lives to discovering these birds. In the process, these dedicated people promote Toronto as an international location for birdwatching, which also leads to conservation efforts to protect animals and green land.

When a novel dam proposal threatens indigenous communities in the Bolivian Amazon, an Uchupiamona woman named Ruth Alipaz Cuqui must step into the unknown and become a spokesperson for her people. To the Uchupiamona people, the river has its own life and personality, just as a woman does. Returning to her land for guidance, Ruth and her people explore an alternative future for their rivers based on adventure tourism and whitewater rafting. While opposing powers much bigger than her, she must come to terms with how much she is willing to risk to protect her river and her people.

On the banks of Louisiana, fierce Indigenous women are ready to fight—to stop the corporate blacksnake and preserve their way of life. They are risking everything to protect Mother Earth from the predatory fossil fuel companies that seek to poison it. The film follows water protector Cherri Foytlin in the swamps of Louisiana as she leads us on a no-nonsense journey of indigenous resistance to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP), which is an extension of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The pipelines are part of an ongoing legacy of colonization and slow genocide. At the heart of the struggle is a battle between people and profit.

The Eastern Black Rail is a federally Endangered and extremely secretive marsh bird, found primarily along the mid-Atlantic and Southeast coast of the United States. Habitat loss from development and sea-level rise inundation has reduced populations by 90% since the 1990s. Without intervention, the remaining east coast population is projected to be extirpated before 2070. Black Rails’ breeding success is incredibly vulnerable to minute changes in water level, and in coastal regions experiencing dramatic changes in storm regimes and steadily rising seas, their future depends on precise water-level management within the critical sites that remain. South Carolina’s ACE Basin is a one such landscape, uniquely comprised of historically dike-impounded wetlands, which today provides a stronghold for some 30 breeding pairs. A grassroots partnership among private landowners, non-profit conservation groups, and state and federal agencies is working urgently to understand the rails’ precise and cryptic needs, and to develop the techniques—and support—required to create those conditions on the ground. The Cornell Lab’s Center for Conservation Media has produced “Weathering Tides” (13 minutes), a short film highlighting the unlikely partnerships and pioneering techniques of this dedicated coalition. The film will be used by agency and non-profit partners in South Carolina and across the Atlantic Coast to build the support and participation necessary to scale effective management efforts beyond the ACE Basin, and to recover Eastern Black Rail populations. To learn more about the work in South Carolina, visit southcarolinablackrails.org. To learn more about efforts to recover Black Rail population across the Atlantic Coast, visit acjv.org/black-rail This film was made possible through generous support from the Robert F. Schumann Foundation.