ewaproject.org

About us

Who we are

1. The ambition

EWA, the film project

At the origin there is the ambition of a fiction director and his team: to create a work entitled EWA, named after its heroine, plunged into the heart of the world of first peoples, deep in the Amazon rainforest.

But very quickly another necessity appeared: extending the film’s impact beyond the emotion of the story.

The impact I am seeking is that of a door opening onto all the ancestral memories, onto all the sciences they can bring to the modern world, if we take the trouble to preserve and share them.
Because it is impossible to grow up healthy without roots (see the work of filmmakers Maurizio and Zahia), these ways of inhabiting the world can light the way to our future.

It is from this ambition that EWA Human Legacy was born.

EWA Human Legacy aims to accompany expeditions to meet first peoples, to support the creation and funding of content, and to preserve these testimonies as video, photography, sound, text and archives. Its vocation is to make this knowledge accessible to scientists, researchers, decision-makers, experts, educators and the curious, in order to nourish a dialogue between ancestral knowledge and contemporary societies.

2. The university of first peoples

First peoples carry a memory of the living world, of territory, of time, of balance and of the relationship with nature that the modern world often rediscovers too late. The project could begin with a first filming session among the Kogi, encountered through the work of Eric Julien and the Tchendukua association. A people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, a high-mountain territory linked to the Caribbean Sea, they are a treasure trove of knowledge to protect, preserve and share. Other peoples, depending on opportunities and the means assembled, have just as much — if not more — to offer.

These communities, present in different regions of the world, are too often exposed to multiple pressures: deforestation, mining, drug trafficking, land exploitation, cultural erasure, media exploitation, cultural appropriation and greenwashing.

EWA proposes to start from the popular power of genre cinema to open a path towards the real. The film draws the audience in through story, danger, action and emotion. The transmedia ecosystem then turns that attention into knowledge and engagement — a kind of university unique of its kind, with measurable impact.

For a company, a foundation, an institution or an engaged brand, EWA offers the possibility of supporting a visible, embodied and documented approach: field action told with cinematic standards, but structured as a tool of preservation and transmission.

3. Why now?

The project answers a simple question: why produce, today, a film and a platform around the knowledge of first peoples? Because this knowledge is disappearing at the very moment when our societies are searching for new answers to ecological, social, health and democratic crises.

The work carried by Tchendukua around the Kogi and the Shikwakalab experience point in a concrete direction: creating spaces of dialogue between indigenous societies, scientists, territories, entrepreneurs and public actors. The themes addressed directly meet EWA’s concerns: health, education, governance, peace, water, land, agriculture, memory of places, regeneration of territories and care for the living world.

In this perspective, EWA could propose a “partnership” to be built with UNESCO or with organisations engaged in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage and local and indigenous knowledge. The wording matters: this is not to claim an established partnership, but to set out a credible institutional trajectory that gives the project a more concrete, more responsible and more durable form.

A platform of living knowledge

The EWA platform is intended to become a searchable audiovisual base: videos, testimonies, interviews, images of practices, maps, thematic sheets, field notebooks and educational resources. It could be organised by peoples, territories, themes and contemporary questions.

  • Governance: how is a collective decision made? Among the Kogi, for example, the place of women, elders, experts and outside perspectives can nourish reflection on our own ways of deciding.
  • Health and well-being: how to connect care, social balance, territory, food and spirituality without artificially separating them?
  • Building and habitat: how to build while taking into account climate, local resources, the water cycle and the memory of places?
  • Nature and territory: how to move from developing places to caring for them — from a logic of exploitation to a logic of attention?
  • Transmission: how to preserve knowledge without extracting it, without turning it into folklore, and without depriving its guardians of it?

This platform should be designed with strong ethical rules: consent, usage rights, shared governance, protection of sensitive knowledge, respect for communities, and the possibility of reserving certain content for authorised audiences.

References, and a gap to fill

Reference initiatives exist, but none answers exactly the same need. The UNESCO LINKS programme works on local and indigenous knowledge systems. UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage documents living practices, expressions and know-how. WIPO works on the legal protection of traditional knowledge. Mukurtu and Local Contexts offer tools for data sovereignty and cultural management. India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library shows that a knowledge base can protect a heritage threatened by appropriation.

The gap to fill lies between these worlds: an accessible, demanding, cinematic audiovisual platform, connected to a popular narrative and able to serve cultural transmission, research, public decision-making and partner engagement all at once. That is precisely the space EWA can occupy.

4. The Film

Genre

Action thriller, adventure, initiatory drama, spiritual romance.

Working logline

After her child is abducted at the edge of an Amazonian port, a woman from a first people of the Amazon forest sets out on a pursuit that forces her to take along a young European consultant tied to a greenwashing operation. Drawn into the heart of the tribe, he discovers, at her side, another way of perceiving life.

5. Why Genre Cinema

EWA does not present itself as a head-on militant film.

The project uses the codes of popular cinema to reach a wide audience:

  • abduction;
  • pursuit;
  • mercenaries;
  • corruption;
  • jungle;
  • river chase;
  • political danger;
  • impossible love;
  • spiritual revelation.

This thriller structure acts as a Trojan horse. It lets the audience in through emotion and tension, then opens onto the real knowledge:

  • Education;
  • health;
  • justice;
  • Politics;
  • Cultures;
  • Hunting;
  • Engineering
  • Relationship with the living world;
  • Relationship with Mother Earth;
  • Spiritual sciences.



Against a backdrop of: deforestation, greenwashing, disappearing knowledge, cultural appropriation, genocide.

The audience comes for the story. It leaves with questions.

The transmedia ecosystem is designed to transmit — and to answer — those questions.

6. The Transmedia Ecosystem

EWA is conceived as a durable content platform, not as an isolated film.

5.1. YouTube documentaries

A series of immersive mini-documentaries exploring the reality behind the fiction:

  • first peoples and threatened territories;
  • forest knowledge;
  • oral transmission;
  • rituals and the relationship with time;
  • food and medical autonomy;
  • mental cartographies;
  • deforestation and economic chains;
  • greenwashing and corporate responsibility;
  • portraits of spiritual leaders, researchers, artists and land defenders.

5.2. Short formats — TikTok / Instagram / YouTube Shorts

Short, regular capsules designed to build an audience:

  • gestures of survival and autonomy;
  • plants, tracks, orientation, fire, water;
  • contrasts between modern dependency and first knowledge;
  • quotations and worldviews;
  • before/after on threatened territories;
  • making-of of the expedition;
  • film preparation and location scouting.

5.3. Field Notebooks

Editorial coverage of scouting and filming journeys:

  • logbook;
  • annotated photos;
  • encounters;
  • logistical difficulties;
  • ethical questions;
  • cultural validations;
  • directing decisions.

5.4. Photography, Exhibition, Art Book

A premium iconographic strand:

  • portraits;
  • landscapes;
  • authorised rituals;
  • traces of destruction;
  • details of gestures and objects;
  • images from the shoot;
  • travelling exhibition;
  • an art book combining narrative, images, testimonies and impact.

5.5. Screenings and Conferences

For partners:

  • private screenings of the teaser, then of the film;
  • meetings with the team;
  • conferences on cinema, first peoples and CSR;
  • internal exhibitions;
  • employee events;
  • employer-brand initiatives.