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Emerging Filmmakers

  • Film

    For thousands of years the Dayak people of the island of Borneo have cultivated their land based on their traditional beliefs. They have developed cultivation technics, such as rotating from a field to another, leaving some fields for years to regain their fertility, and when the time comes, clearing by burning them so they can […]

  • Profile

    Emmanuela Shinta is a Dayak activist and filmmaker whose work is widely known in Southeast Asia. She is the founder of Ranu Welum Found…

  • Playlists

    A central part of our mission is working with young storytellers, supporting them to tell their own stories. This can be via workshops,…

Capacity Building

Since 2013 If Not Us Then Who? has been connecting with and amplifying communicators from across the tropical forests regions.

Vibrant Indigenous film production supports

Cultural resilience and resistance

Record ancestral knowledge and raise pride and profile of indigenous communities

Defence of Indigenous territories and rights

Digital storytelling enables injustices and incursions to be denounced to the world and catalyse action against them

Building solidarity

Sharing stories and solutions across greater distances than ever before

Biodiversity

Indigenous peoples are guardians of 80% of the world’s biodiversity and strong Indigenous land rights have been recognised as an important climate solution

2021 Emerging Filmmakers Professional Development Programme

The Emerging Filmmakers Professional Development Programme is the latest chapter of If Not Us Then Who’s work with Indigenous and community filmmakers. This 3 year project builds on initial film training programmes carried out in Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Indonesia and Brazil, with a range of regional partners, to provide onward capacity-building for trainees as they expand their production and establish themselves in the filmmaking industry.

Indigenous Perspectives

The defence of cultures, languages and territories is one of the hallmarks of indigenous communication and cinema, as affirmed by those of us who have been working from a multitude of contexts to assert our right to tell our stories and through them to relate to other peoples and struggles.

The capacity to construct other meanings of what our ancestors are, what we are and what we aspire to for our future generation, affirm that our proposals have a deep and broad responsibility, which has to do with spirituality, with diversity, with the way we see the world.

David Hernández Palmar | Wayuu IIPUANA

 In total 27 individuals, including 4 collectives were selected for the inaugural year of the program.

With this dialogue of knowledge, we hope to continue honouring our ancestors by practising the gift of storytelling, rethinking and strengthening our own identity

David Hernández Palmar | Wayuu IIPUANA