Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi is a beautifully crafted film about music and the healing power of art. It follows exiled Chilean musician Quique Cruz from to San Francisco to Santiago, Chile where he unlocks painful memories to create a multimedia installation and musical suite. He uses art to help heal wounds inflicted by state-sponsored torture at Villa Grimaldi during the Pinochet regime. To help tell the story, he searches for artist friends who were incarcerated with him. Poets, painters, writers, playwrights, musicians collectively create a narrative in which they explore the contradictions of terror and aesthetics, the notion of pain and beauty and how to convert darkness into light. The film culminates with the performance of the tremendously moving musical suite.
Audience Top Ten - Vancouver International Film Festival, Best Documentary - Mill Valley Film Festival

Archeology of Memory website

Taking Root tells the inspirational story of Keyna's Green Belt Movement and its founder Wangari Maathai, the first environmentalist and first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.  The Green Belt Movement worked tirelessly against deforestation, poverty, embedded economic interests, and government corruption, and became a national political force that changed the course of the country.
The film documents the dramatic confrontations of the 1980s and ‘90s and captures a thirty-year journey of courage to protect the integrally connected issues of the environment, human rights, and democracy. Planting trees for fuel, shade, and food is not something that anyone would imagine as the first step toward winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet with that simple act Wangari Maathai, a woman born in rural Kenya, started down the path that reclaimed her country’s land from 100 years of deforestation, provided new sources of food and income to rural communities, gave previously impoverished and powerless women a vital political role in their country, and ultimately helped to bring down Kenya's twenty-four-year dictatorship.
Audience Award - Hot Docs

Taking Root website

Hear an interview with the filmmakers live on Vancouver Coop Radio's program Redeye on Sat. Feb. 14 at 9:25 am

Interview with the filmmakers on Vermont Public Radio

"In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now."

Wangari Maathai