The main character, Young-eun, lives with her mother, a haenyo diver, in a fishing village on Jeju Island. She learns eco-friendly photography from her friend Seung-hwan, who is a beachcomber. One day, her mother gets caught in a discarded net submerged in the sea and drowns. Young-eun moves away from Jeju and returns two years later for her mother’s death anniversary. She decides to begin taking pictures of sea debris on beaches, and Seung-hwan leaves the island to find a giant floating trash island in the Pacific Ocean on a boat made of recycled materials.
Explore Our Current Streams
Cinema Verde is showcasing our most impactful films yet to encourage every culture across the globe to help save our environment before it’s too late. Become immersed in the trailers for our Cinema Verde Virtual Screenings and Exclusive Director Discussions to learn how you can help build a sustainable future.
Director Discussion Highlights
Now Playing
Jetty Cats explores contemporary animal rights issues through a focus on a feral cat colony that has survived on a rocky, seaside jetty in Southern California for decades. There is an ongoing debate over feral cat colonies involving advocates who support the trap, neuter, and return -- or "TNR" -- model of management, and those who argue that trapping and euthanizing the cats is more humane. This documentary’s point-of-view supports the TNR model and the related “no-kill” animal shelter policy, and features an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, the "Father" of the no-kill movement.
Juskatla weaves together perspectives of the people who live on the islands of Haida Gwaii—an archipelago on Canada’s Northwest coast, and the ancestral territories of the Haida Nation. From industrial loggers who harvest trees from ancient forests, to Sphenia Jones, a Haida matriarch who bears an intimate knowledge of her People’s territories, Juskatla meditates on the divergent ways of being that shape the islands and its people.
“Karibu Nyumbani” translates as “Welcome to my Home” in Swahili. Guides in the Maasai Mara have a deep-rooted pride, knowledge, and love for wildlife. This film encapsulates that passion from the perspective of George Osono, a guide in Mara North Conservancy, who completely embodies this spirit of caring for nature. Throughout the film, you meet Half Tail, Lola's cubs and the other iconic members of the Marsh Pride, Kweli the Cheetah and her three cubs as they prepare for adulthood, and an impressive elephant named Edwin. This film is visual portrait of the Maasai Mara's majestic wildlife, and the stories of the extraordinary animals that call it home. The film encourages people to see the beauty of these animals, recognise how fragile their existence is and in turn care more about protecting them.
Nestled in India’s northeastern Assam district, Kaziranga National Park contains the world’s highest density of the endangered Asian one horned rhino. Long plagued by civil unrest, this park is also ground zero for poaching and illegal trade of rhhorn. The film focuses on the efforts of journalist Uttam Saikia, who begins to serve as a mediator between the park and local poachers.
“If you’ve ever thought ‘Someone should do something about that litter problem’, remember, you’re someone.” Joel Goldes has visited the creek in his suburban Southern California community nearly every day. And for the past 10 years, he’s been picking up litter, trapping invasive crayfish, opening blocked channels, and testifying at local hearings – often the lone voice in support of the under-appreciated ecosystem near his home.
Our garbage accumulates and gives life to a plastic monster. We wish his reign to be short. It is probably time to think over how we produce and consume to pollute less.
The island of O'ahu is covered with coconut palms, but for fear of liability the vast majority of these sacred trees have been stripped of coconuts. The grassroots movement "Niu Now" is on a mission to restore the "niu," or coconut, as a fundamental food crop in Hawai'i and spread the Indigenous wisdom of "aloha 'āina:" loving land and serving people.
An academic woman in Texas becomes concerned when a massive red oak in her backyard seems to be ailing, though she isn’t sure why it bothers her so much. At the same time, in her small cottage, her attention to her work is distracted by news reports she sees and hears. They tell in graphic terms of the out-of-control forest fires up and down the West Coast. Her attention is further pulled in the direction of other stories about the worsening conditions of the world’s rainforests which she discovers are disappearing at the astounding rate of 200,000 acres a day. Suddenly such stories are all she seems to hear and see on the radio or television or on her computer. But when she hears/sees a science report about how trees actually communicate with each other, she begins to realize there may be a connection between her tree and what she is learning from the news. She begins to recall a strong connection she herself has with that tree and allows that connection to regrow…..
Catriona Armour's body art and a special appearance by Dana Lyons of "Cows with Guns" propel the musical narrative about noise pollution in, around, and above the Salish Sea of Washington State and British Columbia.
In the field, we accompany a biologist responsible for the implementation of renaturation solutions, the most coherent with the activities already present. A series of hedgerows planted to ensure bocage continuity is a typical means of providing food and shelter for small mammals involved in an ecosystem that includes cultivated fields and wild lands. Compromises are made to allow continued passage with farm machinery. The viewer discovers that it is possible to observe significant changes in biodiversity if one is attentive to the smallest phenomena, such as the return of butterflies that had disappeared. Through the testimonies of involved farmers, we learn that synergies between animals, plants and farms increasingly make it possible to do without chemical substitutes, those that have long accompanied the productivist approach on which agriculture is still largely dependent. From the scouting in the middle of winter, to the informal meetings between participants discussing in the middle of the heat wave, the film shows from the inside an experience of active awareness but not without its paradoxes. How to reconcile issues as remote as profitability and biodiversity.