Top 25 Films for Earth Day
In honor of Earth Day, here's a collection of the top 25 most-streamed environmental films on OVID so far this year.
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Echoes of the Invisible
Directed by Steve Elkins • Documentary • With Paul Salopek, Rachel Sussman, Al Arnold, Anil Ananthaswamy, Lynda Lynch, Losang Samten • 2020 • 106 minutes
"Echoes of the Invisible" interweaves a mosaic of profound quests. A blind man runs alone through Death Valley as journalist Paul Salopek walk...
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Symbiotic Earth
Directed by John Feldman • Documentary • 2018 • 147 minutes
SYMBIOTIC EARTH explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a brilliant and radical scientist, whose unconventional theories challenged the male-dominated scientific community and are today fundamentally changing how we look at our se...
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Dark Circle
Directed by Judy Irving, Christopher Beaver & Ruth Landy • Documentary • 1982 • 82 minutes
It’s been 75 years since the start of the Atomic Age, with the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, but its trail of destruction has never ended.
Dark...
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Becoming Animal
Directed by Emma Davie, Peter Mettler • Documentary • 2018 • 79 minutes
An inspired collaboration between filmmakers Emma Davie (I Am Breathing) and Peter Mettler (The End of Time) and radical writer and philosopher David Abram ("The Spell of the Sensuous"), Becoming Animal is an urgent and imme...
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In the Light of Reverence
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2001 • 73 minutes
Across the USA, Native Americans are struggling to protect their sacred places. Religious freedom, so valued in America, is not guaranteed to those who practice land-based religion. Every year, more sacred sites - the land-based eq...
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Thank You for the Rain
Directed by Julia Dahr and Kisilu Musya • Documentary • 2017 • 87 minutes
Five years ago Kisilu, a Kenyan farmer, started to use his camera to capture the life of his family, his village and the damages of climate change. When a violent storm throws him and a Norwegian filmmaker together we see ...
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Bluespace
Directed by Ian Cheney • Documentary • 2016 • 73 minutes
Could humans live on Mars? Would we want to? Emmy-nominated filmmaker Ian Cheney provides insight into our currently unsustainable relationship with our home planet by examining the sci-fi speculation of 'terraforming,' or making another p...
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Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Directed by Jessica Oreck • Documentary • With Takeshi Yoro • 2010 • 90 minutes
Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo delves into the mystery of Japan's age-old love affair with insects. From the first fabled emperor who dubbed Japan the "Isle of the Dragonflies," to the cricket-selling businesses of the ...
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La Supplication (Voices from Chernobyl)
Directed by Pol Cruchten • Documentary • 2017 • 86 minutes
Based on the novel by Svetlana Alexievich, recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature, La Supplication (Voices from Chernobyl) does not deal with Chernobyl, but rather with the world of Chernobyl, about which we know very little. Eyewitnes...
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Cooked
Directed by Judith Helfand • Documentary • 2020 • 82 minutes
Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents--mostly elderly and black-died over the course of one week. As COOKED links the deadly heat wave's devastation back to the underlying manmade disaster ...
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It Is Not Over Yet
Directed by Louise Detlefsen • Documentary • 2021 • 94 minutes
At the small retirement home Dagmarsminde, the founding nurse May Bjerre Eiby has no interest in specific dementia diagnoses or medicine, since neither is improving the quality of life for the 11 residents. Instead, May and her staff...
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The Cordillera of Dreams
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2019 • 85 minutes
Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship bet...
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Food Coop
Directed by Tom Boothe • Documentary • 2017 • 97 minutes
FOOD COOP takes us deep into the belly of the Park Slope Food Coop, one of America's oldest cooperative food supermarkets, with a healthy dose of insight and wit.
Nestled deep in New York City, which, for many, exemplifies both the glory ...
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The World Before Your Feet
Directed by Jeremy Workman • Documentary • With Matt Green • 2018 • 95 minutes
There are 8,000 miles of sidewalks, paths and roads in New York City and for the past six years Matt Green has been walking them all--every street, block, pedestrian overpass and park lane. A five borough journey that...
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Another Paradise
Directed by Olivier Magis • Documentary • 2019 • 82 minutes
Fifty years ago, the entire Creole population of the Chagos Islands was expelled by the British authorities. This secret operation took place to facilitate the leasing of the main island, Diego Garcia, to the US government so that it co...
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El Mar La Mar
Directed by Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki • Documentary • 2017 • 94 minutes
An immersive and enthralling journey through the Sonoran Desert on the U.S.-Mexico border, EL MAR LA MAR weaves together harrowing oral histories from the area with hand-processed 16mm images of flora, fauna and items...
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Nostalgia for the Light
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes
Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent ...
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A Cow's Life
Directed by Emmanuel Gras • Documentary • 2011 • 62 minutes
In the fields, we see them, extended on the grass or grazing peacefully. Large placid beasts that we thought we knew because they are livestock. Lions, gorillas, bears have our attention, but has anyone ever really looked at the cows? H...
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Insecticides: A License to Kill
Directed by Miyuki Droz, Sylvain Lepetit, Sébastien Séga • Documentary • 2022 • 58 minutes
The insect apocalypse is here. For decades, scientists have recorded plummeting insect numbers around the world. And when insects go, so do large swathes of complex ecosystems: bird populations decline, fi...
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Chocolate Road
Directed by Tanya Chuturkova • Documentary • With Susumu Koyama, Maribel Lieberman, Mikkel Friis-Holm • 2021 • 92 minutes
Chocolate Road is a discovery of where chocolate comes from. Three renowned chocolatiers - Maribel Lieberman, Susumu Koyama and Mikkel Friis-Holm - take us through the proces...
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The Absent House
Directed by Ruben Abruna • Documentary • 2013 • 55 minutes
A designer from Puerto Rico pioneered green architecture thirty years ago, and today he confronts climate change with sustainable constructions including a house without a roof that is completely independent of the power and water utilit...
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Anais Goes to War
Directed by Marion Gervais • Documentary • 2014 • 46 minutes
Anaïs is a determined and energetic 24-year-old with a dream: to have her own farm and make herbal teas from her plants in Brittany. But getting there won't be easy.
While Anaïs clearly loves spending her days among aromatic plants—pr...
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Surviving Progress
Directed by Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks • Documentary • 2011 • 86 minutes
Technological advancement, economic development, population increase—are they signs of a thriving society? Or too much of a good thing? Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese, this provocative documentary explores the conce...