Oikos/Homecoming
Friday, May 2, 2025 | 7:30 p.m. | The Hollywood Theatre
Includes the winner of our 2025 Best Conservation Film Award, WELCOME HOME, and two official selections in our 2025 Indigenous Voices series.
“Ecology” comes from the Greek “Oikos,” which means house or household. We embrace the radical (root) definition of ecology, exploring what it means for humanity to attain, hold, honor, and transmit knowledge of the vast, interconnected home (eco) system that makes just and joyful lives possible for all generations.
In Oikos/Homecoming, we present the regional premieres of four new ecological films from around the living world about different ways of being at and returning to home.
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WELCOME HOME
Winner, 2025 Best Conservation Film Award
USA | 2024 | 21 minutes | Dir. Alan Lacy
When the people of Colorado voted to return wolves to the state, they set in motion a unique and incredibly important conservation success story. WELCOME HOME celebrates the return of this iconic carnivore to Colorado, and examines how the state is recovering wolves in a thoughtful way that cares for wildlife and people.
TENTSÍTEWAHKWE
Official Selection, 2025 Indigenous Voices Series
USA | 2024 | 17 minutes | Dir. Katsitsionni Fox
Jessica Shenandoah is Wolf Clan from the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, and she comes from a large family of knowledge keepers. As a young girl it was normal for her to go with her mother and grandmother to pick medicines, berries and wild food plants. She is now a mother of four, seeking to bring back the land based practices that have been lost. Jessica reaches both inside and outside Haudenosaunee territories to find those who have reconnected with this knowledge, so she can bring it back to her community and transmit it to future generations. She embodies Tentsítewahkwe, as she picks up knowledge of the old ways, these slow methods of creating and connecting in reciprocity with the earth.
GARDENING IN A WAR ZONE
USA & Ukraine | 2023 | 33 minutes | Dir. Rob Finch
Alla is a gardener, writer, and caretaker. She lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. On the morning the war started, she could hear the explosions and gunfire. Munitions and debris have landed just yards away from her grandmother’s home. Air alerts scream day and night, and it’s common to lose electricity and gas. Yet, every day she boards a public bus that drops her near her family’s garden, which her great-grandfather planted as a small apple orchard after World War II to help her struggling ancestors survive. While the garden is a refuge for Alla, it’s also a critical lifeline for her family. She collects as many seeds as she can from her clematis and other rare flowers. By selling them, Alla cares for her elderly grandmother, her mother-in-law, and her ailing husband. Even as the harsh winter creeps ever closer, Alla is undeterred. With relentless optimism and a belief in the power of beauty and goodness, Alla fights for the survival of her family one seed at a time.
FROM GOD TO MAN (Ma ŋaye ka Masaala a se ka Wɔmɛti)
Official Selection, 2025 Indigenous Voices Series
Sierra Leone | 2024 | 15 minutes | Dir. Lansana Mansaray
On the day that Lansana Mansaray was born, a tree was planted in his name in his father’s Limba village. Now an Emmy and Peabody nominated filmmaker, Mansaray returns to the same village to better understand the essential relationship that Limbas share with the trees that define every aspect of community life. Amidst celebratory, humorous, and quotidian moments of village life, he interweaves reflections from a community that has endured more than its share of hardship: colonization, a civil war, and growing threats to the forests that the Limbas treasure.
