In Touch with Living Lands: Documentary storytelling for environmental justice

The event centres on the screening of the Twin documentaries Human Rights Beyond the Human?: Marsyangdi WileRi’iba: May You Live as Long as the River (Nepal) and Aty Seikuinduwa: Judge Between Worlds (Colombia). Developed through long-term collaborative research and cinematographic documentary practice, they explore Indigenous understandings of the living land in contexts shaped by environmental harm and extractive economies.

Through storytelling, sound, and everyday encounters, audiences are invited to engage with relationships between humans and more-than-human worlds that challenge dominant assumptions about nature, law, and knowledge. Rather than presenting research through lectures or writings, the films offer a sensory and cinematic experience of complex socio-environmental realities.

Following the screenings, a transdisciplinary conversation will bring together researchers, filmmakers, and impact practitioners to reflect on documentary filmmaking as a mode of inquiry, public engagement, and knowledge-making. Together with audience the event will explore questions such as: What becomes visible through film that often remains absent from academic texts? How can storytelling foster dialogue across different knowledge systems? What role can documentary film play in addressing urgent environmental challenges?

These documentaries were developped within the research project RIVERS-Water/human rights beyond the human? Indigenous  ontologies, plurilegal encounters and interlegal translation (2019-2025) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement No. 804003.