
The Living Forest
The Kichwa people of Sarayaku, a community deep in Ecuador's Amazon, describe their territory as a 'living forest,' a place where humans, animals, and plants exist as one interconnected system rather than a resource to be divided up. That belief sits at the center of a real conflict: oil companies want access to their ancestral land, and the film follows the Kichwa's resistance to that pressure. The story travels from the forest itself to Paris, where a delegation of indigenous representatives attends the COP21 climate conference in 2015, working to get their case heard among heads of state and climate negotiators. The film sets the two settings against each other deliberately, the intimacy of life in Sarayaku against the scale and formality of an international summit, to ask whether a worldview built on coexistence can hold its ground against industrial and diplomatic power. It ends without a guaranteed outcome, on a fight still being fought.