Philadelphia, USA English It’s another weekday for the crew at Bennett Compost. Hundreds of paying customers have left buckets-full of food scraps and other organic waste on their front curb across Philadelphia city. The crew set out in trucks to gather these heaps of organic waste materials and then there’s the patient work of processing the waste into nutrient rich compost. Can this ecologically beneficial work be done in the absence of robust city infrastructures and clear codes? Can it be done while paying workers a decent wage and providing them essential benefits? Can all this be done while making a profit to keep the enterprise sustainable? This is the story of The Composters, a story of an enterprise that strives to achieve these aims.

Over 50 countries are actively seeking to expand their territories via the ocean through technoscience and international law

Mumbai, India Marathi, Hindi & English The film is based on concept, field and archival research by Lalitha Kamath and Gopal Dubey from Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai The film is framed as a juxtaposition, the story of two Mumbais, that are entangled in dynamic tension. It is told through the experiences of Mumbai's indigenous fishing community, the Kolis. The first is the city of the sea, that comes from living according to the rhythm of rising and falling water levels. The second is the terrestrial, propertied city, driven by the imperatives of capitalism. As fishers negotiate these wet and dry terrains, we seek to recover their living histories, knowledges and practices so that we may understand how to inhabit the city and yet embrace wetness. We base our work on the fisher's community archive – a collection in the making, inspired by two ongoing processes of fishers: estrangement and reclaiming. Seen as a community that’s subaltern and on the move, fishers have typically played a minor role in official histories. We seek to overturn this by asking: How can we create an archive that relates to the intimate and global movements mediated by the sea? That draws from customary use rights, memories, knowledges and relations with beyond-human entities (land, sea, mangroves, fish) that transgress property boundaries? That serves as an archive against erasure? The archive of estrangement draws from documents of the Turbhe Cooperative Fishing Society. It reveals the shifting position of state agencies from officially recognizing the community's claims to actively endangering these, causing estrangement from sea-based life. The archive of reclaiming takes shape as a glossary of terms that evoke community memories, knowledges and practices that emerge through involvement with their fluid landscape. Reclaiming here recalls the erased past but in new acts of futuring. These oppose state-led land reclamation projects that rely on erasing Koli modes of habitation and polluting and making property of the sea.

Barcelona, Spain Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese with English Subtitles The El Raval neighbourhood in Barcelona has historically been a space of working class struggles in which the identities of its neighbours have claimed their right to the city. The processes of gentrification are stripping Raval’s streets of their mischievous physiognomy. However, there are neighbourhood stories that talk about the experiences, complicities and affections between people who resist in an environment that wants them out. This film is a small sample of some of these voices: those born in the neighbourhood, the newcomers, white ones, black ones, women, men, young, old, whores, all neighbours. More than the voice of each one of them, it sets out to present a choral story of struggles and common causes. It is a story about how the bonds between people make possible for a single street (Robadors) to become a symbol of resistance and freedom.

Urdu, Hindi with English Subtitles Karachi Pakistan Edinburgh, UK This documentary delves into the rich and unique ecosystem of mangroves in Karachi, Pakistan. The film follows the journey of a local fishing community who are extremely vulnerable in the face of climate change. Severe cyclonic storms, the frequency and intensity of which are increasing at an alarming rate, have adversely affected their day-to-day life. The film interlinks their precarious lives with climate change, destruction of mangroves, and coastal development projects, and the complete apathy from those in positions of power.

Spanish with English Subtitles Venezuela Steven F Austin State University, Texas In the past, Coche Island represented a top tourist destination in Venezuela. Today, the people of the island experience life threatening crisis and scarcity of water, electricity, transportation, and heath care. The quality of life has declined for two decades but the residents call themselves "blessed." Students from SFA State University, Texas use film-making to speak to residents of the island and tell a story of people who maintain hope despite hardship. They have faith that they may revive the tourist and artisanal fishing industries that brought prosperity during previous generations.

Manchester Uk English The Secret City is a 12-minute documentary about the Manchester neighbourhoods of St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park, using moving-image, spoken word and contemporary music composition to explore a relationship between new building developments and pieces of Manchester’s social history. This piece was developed in layers, later turned to acts: Act 1. High Rise: A conversation between old and new buildings. Do they feel exposed standing alone? Are they united by time and memories of what they have seen? Act 2. The ground: Pavements and gravestones, and anything related to the Earth. Reincarnated inanimacy. Objects and spaces that have been present to new and old life. A valley. Act 3. Underland: People buried below surface, inhabitants of the past, remembered through history of this place. What does it mean to have history speak on a person's behalf? How might that feel?

English, Te Reo Maori Aotearoa New Zealand Rapid urbanization, intensifying natural hazards, glacial retreat, exponential tourism growth, and expanding dairy farms are having an unassailable effect on Aotearoa New Zealand’s (NZ) natural and cultural landscapes. The Spatial Awareness Project short film sets out to explore and challenge New Zealands's land use classifications and the values that underpin them. As both an educational resource and a community discussion prompt, the film offers questions - rather than answers - to environmental problems and the ways in which we might solve them. The Director: The Spatial Awareness Project short film set out to visually represent the main land use categories in Aotearoa New Zealand and question the values that underpin this classification system. Filmed at over thirty locations across the country, the film showcases a variety of examples of each land use category, incorporating private, iwi (tribal), and publicly administered land and water. In the beginning, our goal was to showcase different land use types and the stories that go along with them (through a complimentary podcast series) to students who had rarely traveled outside their hometowns. We hoped that by bringing these places, stories and questions into the classroom we might create space for discussions that could bridge the disconnects between our students: generational, rural/urban, farmer/climate activist, etc. Yet, the film's narrative is ultimately informed by those podcast interviews, the team's own experiences and academic research, and my conversations with the landowners at each filming location. Over time, it became less about pointing out 'bad' land use types or highlighting a particular alternative to the land use classification system and more about raising awareness of those disconnects ... about sparking conversations in the broader public sphere that might lead to new collaborative solutions.

Germany Supporting local transformations with the Grandhotel Cosmopolis: cultural politics, care and collaboration beyond the pandemic The film is an emotional, visual and narrative dimension of a collective learning process of a cultural institution that took place in the pandemic. The directors say: We aimed to interpretate provisional findings of an activist-research project that took place at a cultural institution in Augsburg (Germany) during the pandemic. Symbolised as “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process” the project relates to the current crisis of culture production, raising questions on purpose, strategy and participants for the so often claimed need for cultural change towards more just, sustainable and fair urban life. Based on several municipalist engagements, it assembles in a post-structural interpretation what was learned on enabling and limiting conditions for the co-creation of collective actions towards urban transformation. Dwelling on self-organisation, collective reflection and re-signification, the architects for transformation experiment with practices of co-production. Understood as prefigurative practices they might serve as suggestions for urban planning in Augsburg and more specifically they intent to inform the following collective re-design of the 2600qm building that cultural institution wants to maintain as real world lab. When this film narrates the phase of deliberative orientation about this institutional re-design, a second film will accompany the implementation of hopefully co-designed modifications. The film itself was produced in collaboration of people who participated in and made sense in different ways of the “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process”, but directed by the activist-researcher herself. The aesthetic form reflects its discontinuities, envisioned fears and hopes and ambiguities that belong to this collective learning in support of urban transformation beyond the pandemic.

Guarani, Spanish Filmed in Paraguay Griffith University, Brisbane Australia 70 mins The filmmakers say: Yuyos is an audio-visual ethnographic project lived together with the peasant family Franco Gauto, in Colonia Luz Bella, rural Paraguay. Yuyos are plants. Trees, shrubs, herbs that can be medicinal. They are wild or cultivated. There are yuyos that can be toxic and other that are beneficial for health. The film documents the family’s ethnobotanical knowledge in relation to their daily life. By revealing the cultural importance attributed to medicinal plants, the protagonists enlighten their idea of agroecology as a way to face current ecological issues and crises. Colonia Luz Bella’s community is socio-environmentally at stake due to continuous deforestation to make room for industrial plantations and pastures. These not only threaten biodiversity—directly influencing the access to yuyos—, they also determine a notable cultural loss. Born to recover and value the natural medicine’s heritage of one family dedicated to agroecology, the ethnographic film aims to speaks for a whole community in cohabitation with deforestation. In a context of familiar sharing, eased by the social beverage of tereré, the yuyos become narrative agents of stories of commitment and eco-resistance. Our idea was to recollect audio-visually ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge of one family living in rural Paraguay, where they struggle against deforestation to maintain their cultural and biological heritage and knowledge of different plant species.