OTHER-GROUNDS FILM FESTIVAL - REYKJAVÍK, ICELAND 

2nd of May-4th of May, 2025

Concept text: 

Colonial narratives are deeply woven into our timeline, spaces, and surroundings. The crises we face today—environmental, social, and political—are also crises of perception, imagination, and relational intelligence. How do we loosen the grip of ego-centric paradigms? Trapped in an anthropocentric, capitalist worldview, we struggle to see beyond the systems that shape our reality. How do we create space for other ways of being, knowing, and relating—ways that existed before, often silenced, when we lived in deeper connection with nature?

Recognising the need for diverse voices and knowledge systems, we can, through experience and honest dialogue, enrich our intentions and practices for cultivating an ecology of belonging. Around the world, Indigenous communities, ecological practitioners, and many others are working to protect nature and the more-than-human world. The Rights of Nature movement seeks to legally, politically, and socially uphold the protection of life, ecosystems, and biodiversity.

Today, we may be ready to unlearn and relearn—together with humans, other-than-humans, and the land. It is time to open pathways for learning new ways of relating to the world. Other-Grounds Film Festival is an intercultural, collective initiative exploring what it means to be human on Earth and our responsibilities in an ecology of relationality.

A combination of films, roundtables, and conversations, Other-Grounds Film Festival brings together diverse ways of knowing, amplifying voices that advocate for sustainability, collective consciousness, Rights of Nature, and more-than-human perspectives—where an eco-centric existence is seen as an evolutionary goal.

Other-Grounds Film Festival will present films from Mongolia, Taiwan, New-Zealand, Alps (Austria), Greenland, Sápmi Lands (Norway and Finland), Mexico, Peru, Iceland, Colombia, Sweden, Ethiopia. 

Day 1: 02.05 

Ealát

Director: Elle Márja Eira

Country:  Sápmi, (Norway) | Year: 2021 | Runtime: 32 minutes

Synopsis: “As long as the reindeer exist here, so do we”. Through Elle Márjá Eira`s eyes we follow her family in different seasons with their reindeer herd. A story about living and surviving in Sámi reindeer husbandry in strange times.

Screening Times:

• Friday, 2nd of May - 18:10-19:00

The River Is Me

Director: David Freid

Country: United States, Aotearoa (New Zealand)| Year: 2018 | Runtime: 17 minutes

Synopsis:  For many years, this river’s ownership was under dispute. Now, it owns itself. In what’s believed to be a world’s first, the Whanganui River’s been granted legal personhood, with the same rights and responsibilities as you and me. But determining where a river ends and the rest of nature begins — that may be up for some debate.

Screening Times:

• Friday, 2nd of May - 18:10-19:00

Day 2: 03.05 

The Church Forests of Ethiopia

Director: Jeremy Seifert
Country: Ethiopia, United States | Year: 2020 | Runtime: 9 minutes

Synopsis: Over the past century, farming and the needs of a growing population have replaced nearly all of Ethiopia’s old-growth forests with agricultural fields. This film tells the story of the country’s church forests—pockets of lush biodiversity, protected by hundreds of churches, that are scattered like emerald pearls across a brown sea of farm fields.

Screening Time:

Saturday, 3rd May – 13:00-13:30

Honoring Darkness

Director: Juan Camilo
Country: Iceland, Colombia | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 18 minutes

Synopsis:
A poetic exploration on the process of facing the ‘shadow’, which is the darkness that inhabits each one of us. By listening to the personal perspective of a psychiatrist and Sri Vidya practitioner, we will discover a way for humans to integrate themselves, by accepting and honouring darkness while renovating a sense of the sacred in the socio-natural world.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 3rd May – 13:00-13:30

Mamu

Director: Aephie Chen
Country: Taiwan, United Kingdom | Year: 2024 | Runtime: 15 minutes

Synopsis:
Mayaw's indigenous Taiwanese roots and his daughter's biracial identity are at the heart of their transcendent dreams. As Mayaw's mind fades, the call of his homeland grows stronger, leading to a magical reconnection with the help of lullabies and mystical guardians.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 3rd May – 14:0-14:15

ICE

Director: Christoph Matt, Bernhard Poscher, Sympoietic Society art collective
Country: Austria | Year: 2023 | Runtime: 6 minutes

Synopsis:
In Austria's UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Großes Walsertal, an intercultural group of artists unites for a final event. Centered on a disappearing alpine glacier, they climb the Rote Wand mountain to pay respects to the local glacier's remnants. Their art highlights the need for empathy and care practices towards nature and explores the bond between humans and the natural world in an interdisciplinary realm.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 3rd May – 16:00-16:30

Qulleq

Director: Aka Hansen
Country: Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) | Year: 2023 | Runtime: 3 minutes

Synopsis:Qulleq is an invitation to be present for a short time while a Qulleq is lit. Qulleq is a traditional oil lamp, that made it possible for our ancestors to keep fire inside a house made of snow. The qulleq made it possible to have light, heat and a place to cook and was essential for Inuit.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 3rd May – 16:00-16:30

Shangri-La

Directors: Seoyeon Ha and Leon Meschede

Country: Mongolia, South Korea, Germany | Year: 2023 | Runtime: 23 minutes

Synopsis:
Shangri-La is a videoessay that takes us through Mongolia from an intercultural perspective. The film explores the contrast between tradition and modernity in current day Mongolia, reflecting on the fact that the filmmakers come from the industrialized countries of Germany and South Korea. By combining their own film material with archive footage and “time images" and through two narrative voices, a multi-perspective view of the country in transformation, of the changing paradigms of time and space and of the gap between Western and indigenous belief systems is created.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 3rd May – 16:00-16:30

Day 3: 04.05 

KII NCHE NDUTSA (TIME AND THE SEASHELL)

Director: Itandehui Jansen
Country: Mexico | Year: 2020 | Runtime: 13 minutes

Synopsis:
A young Indigenous boy imagines his future while listening to the sounds of a seashell. An Indigenous man recalls his past listening to the same shell. The man remembers birds and fireflies in his childhood, that are no longer there. The short film is invites an audience to consider past, present and future of a changing landscape and vanishing biodiversity.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 4th May – 13:30-14:30

Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal

Director: Alisi Telengut

Country: Buryad-Mongolia, Germany, Canada | Year: 2024 | Runtime: 10 minutes

Synopsis:
The formation of Lake Baikal in Siberia is reimagined with hand-painted animation and found objects, featuring the voice of an Indigenous woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat language (a Mongolian dialect).

Screening Time:
Saturday, 4th May –  13:30-14:30

A Tree is Like a Man

Director: Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir
Country: Iceland, Colombia | Year: 2019 | Runtime: 29 minutes

Synopsis:
A Tree is Like a Man - En la maloca de Don William" is an attempt to touch the otherworld through its edges. Filmmaker Thorbjorg Jonsdottir met Ayahuasquero Don William back in the year 2000 by chance while traveling in the Colombian Amazon. This encounter led to a collaboration that developed over a decade between the filmmaker and the shaman. Shot on 16mm, the film serves as a personal witness to Don William's lifelong relationship to ayahuasca and other plant medicines that are native to the jungle. With the rainforest a rich labyrinthine background, this portrait is at once intimate and spare, opening up to alternate realities as dense as the jungle itself, with kaleidoscopic multiplicities in both the natural and the spiritual realms. Part ethnographic travelogue, part poetic formalism, the film never fully relies on genre tropes in its attempts to communicate the parallel histories and narratives of the Amazon and its cultural figure heads.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 4th May – 13:30-14:30

I Am River, River is Me

Director: Petr Lom
Country: Aotearoa (New Zealand) | Year: 2024 | Runtime: 86 minutes

Synopsis:
A canoe trip down the Whanganui River in New Zealand, led by a Māori elder, awakens spiritual belief and practice, and becomes a call to action to draw closer to nature and fight climate change through a fundamental value shift.

Screening Time:
Saturday, 4th May – 17:00-18:30