Valleys of Hope and Despair; peace building through independent environmental documentaries

Social and environmental documentaries aim to stress the importance of sustainable development and the need for humanity to take care of our shared planetary ecosystem. Using film as an art form to express ecological peace as a “dreamed-of order” is a way to create understanding between warring parties. Social documentaries are aimed to enlighten and inform on the positive nexus between sustainable development, democracy and peace. Ecological peace building as a concept is based on the principle that a shared environmental concern unites rather than divides. This paper focuses on the use of documentary film to express this principle by documenting ecological peace building efforts in Israel and Palestine and the experiences of filming environmental documentaries in hostile environments.