In POWERLANDS, a young Navajo filmmaker investigates displacement of Indigenous people and devastation of the environment caused by the same chemical companies that have exploited the land where she was born.
At the age of 19, Navajo filmmaker Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso began following the trail of corporations – BHP & Glencore - that are destroying her community. She visited Indigenous communities in Mexico, Colombia and The Philippines, and learned from their resistance. POWERLANDS shows that in every corner of the earth, indigenous people are being pushed off their land by corporate extractive industries. But in all of these nations, Indigenous people are refusing to stand by and let the earth and their culture be taken. The story of this film is told by indigenous women themselves. This film is in seven languages, including several indigenous languages rarely captured on film.
Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso is an award-winning queer Navajo filmmaker. She was a fellow with the Firelight Media Documentary Filmmaker Lab, and the 4th World Indigenous Media Lab. She started making films at the age of 9, through the Native youth media project Outta Your Backpack Media. At the age of 13 she made the award-winning fiction film In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman, based in the true story of her great-great-great grandmother Yellow Woman, who lived through the Navajo Long Walk of 1864-1868. The film screened in over 90 film festivals internationally and won 11 awards. Ivey Camille continued to refine her filmmaking craft with a full scholarship to Idyllwild Arts Academy in California. She later returned home to work on films in her community of Navajo Nation. At the age of 19, Ivey Camille began work on Powerlands, her first feature. Powerlands has screened internationally and won several festival awards including the The 2022 Rigoberta Menchú Grand Prize. She is currently at work on her next feature, She Breathes.
World Premiere - Sedona International Film Festival 2022
American Documentary Film Festival 2022
Arizona International Film Festival 2022
Bentonville Film Festival 2022
American Documentary Film Festival 2022 - Best Feature Award
Chicken & Egg Project Hatched 2022
Producer - Jordan Flaherty
Cinematographer - Melisa Cardona
