Coexistence Between Indigenous and Urban Futures | People’s Planet Project
Indigenous people are at the forefront of conserving biodiversity. Their skills, knowledge, and practices offer essential lessons in communal living with the more-than-human world. This is a model we desperately need to confront the unfolding climate crisis. Despite this, their stories have often been told through the lens of outsiders, people unfamiliar with their cultures and territories.
But what would happen if Indigenous peoples were both the protagonists and the tellers of their own truths? What new realities might emerge? What if we could bridge the gap not only between humans and nature but also between humans themselves? By listening to the voices of Indigenous communities, we might begin to understand how our choices affect their lives and how deeply interconnected we truly are.
To explore this further, we spoke with Abdel Mandili, founder of People’s Planet Project, a climate justice collective that trains Indigenous communities to use technology not only to map their lands but also to document legal evidence.
Born in Amsterdam with Indigenous roots among the Amazigh people of southern Morocco, Abdel stands at the intersection of two worlds: Indigenous and urban. From this unique position, he has developed a multidisciplinary approach that brings together filmmakers, cartographers, environmental lawyers, and Indigenous communities to advance climate justice.
Today, these new tools have become powerful weapons in the hands of Indigenous communities fighting against extractive multinational corporations. In Abdel’s words, “They call themselves digital warriors.”
Priyanka Singh Parihar How would you describe the physical and emotional landscape of your childhood?
Abdel Mandili My Indigenous roots come from the Amazigh people from the south of Morocco. But I grew up in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In the summer holidays, I visited my grandparents and family back in Morocco. I would listen to the stories, the myths, and the legends told by my grandfather. There was also a historical perspective of mountains and rivers and valleys and rituals that were connected to these ancestral stories. I also remember how I would grab my dad’s camera and capture our summer holiday in the Atlas Mountains in the south of Morocco. So that’s probably how my passion for the Indigenous cause started.
Most of the time we see numbers and problems in the media and news, but the stories that I’d love to tell are to humanise these and to actually give faces to these problems.
Abdel Mandili
Priyanka When and how did you begin working with the People’s Planet Project?
Abdel In my professional career, I worked in Indonesia with local filmmakers there in 2017. I was covering the topics around the flora and fauna and the Indigenous struggle. Indigenous communities were evicted from their land; their forest territories were being destroyed or turned into palm oil monoculture. I worked there for a year. When I came back, we had documentary films that were shown at festivals, but the Indigenous communities were left with the same problem.
So we started to ask questions to Indigenous communities: “How can we help you as filmmakers in this battle against deforestation?” They told us that when we weren’t present, the conflicts escalated. They had no equipment or training to document what was happening.
That’s when we realised the need to focus on capacity building and training Indigenous communities so they could tell their own stories and use film as a tool for activism. We launched a small crowdfunding campaign among family and friends and bought secondhand cameras. Two months later, we were in the Sumatran rainforest teaching filmmaking to young Indigenous members. It was well received.
That was the moment I realised this could be more than a pilot workshop in Sumatra. I began consulting with other Indigenous communities around the world, for instance, in Brazil, where we had an existing network. There, we saw communities using satellite imagery to detect deforested areas and report them to the environmental police. We decided to combine the art of filmmaking with geospatial mapping in support of Indigenous rights and climate justice.
That is how People’s Planet Project was founded.
Now we are a collective of Indigenous filmmakers, cartographers, and environmental lawyers; with a multidisciplinary approach, we are bringing the visual aspect of evidence gathering with the spatial imagery and satellite data.
The way we work begins with training the Indigenous community. From there, we co-create the storyboards with them. That’s where the meaningful stories emerge, when the community identifies the challenges they’re facing.
Abdel Mandili
Priyanka From inspiration and community to storytelling, what is your creative process in filmmaking? What do you find most exciting and most challenging about it?
Abdel I think the style I’ve developed is more of an ethnographic approach to storytelling, embedding with a community or a character over a long period of time. To minimise the distance between myself and the protagonist or community, the camera is simply a documenting tool. The way we work begins with training the Indigenous community. From there, we co-create the storyboards with them. That’s where the meaningful stories emerge, when the community identifies the challenges they’re facing. That’s how a documentary film comes to life. The trained community members also become part of the film crew. So the story is told locally, by the community itself, while we provide backbone support and ensure it reaches a global audience.
As documentary filmmakers, we need to keep our eyes and ears open to the different ways a story can take shape. In some ways, that’s a beautiful part of the process but also a challenging one, because it requires a lot of patience. Most of the time we see numbers and problems in the media and news, but the stories that I’d love to tell are to humanise these and to actually give faces to these problems.
Priyanka How would you describe Our Grandparents Hunted Here? What is the one most important takeaway for the viewers?
Abdel Our latest film, ‘Our Grandparents Hunted Here,’ is the first documentary that we have finished with People’s Planet Project. It started with a workshop. We trained a group of Indigenous filmmakers. The second time we came back, we saw that they had been using the equipment, flying drones to patrol the Amazon.
Then we simply capture them working with these tools. That’s how we created this short film about their work. They have contributed to the creative process and are part of the crew and protagonists of the film.
Priyanka What is the major takeaway you would want the audience to perceive from it?
Abdel I think people that do not know a lot about Indigenous people assume that they are primitive and isolated. But I think within ‘Our Grandparents Hunted Here,’ the audience can actually see how they have embraced technology as new tools and new weapons against ongoing struggles; they call themselves digital warriors.
They are using technology to fight back against big multinationals threatening their community. To document, disseminate and show the world what is happening and how the forests and rivers are being attacked. At the same time, they’re capturing the deep connection between their livelihood and the natural world and how everything is interconnected. For them the forest is a library, school, a pharmacy, a market, and all the wisdom of their ancestors is connected to trees, medicinal plants, rivers, etc.
The title of the film is inspired by an area that is completely deforested. One of our protagonists mentions that this is a place where his grandparents used to hunt, and now it’s completely deforested. For us, it’s a deforested place, but for them, it’s a place where childhood memories were made and a livelihood was sustained and sadly, it is not there anymore.
Through the films we are preserving Indigenous languages and songs. We need to make sure that it’s documented in the best way possible. So it does not fade away as the elderly people pass. These songs refer to the land and how communities have been safeguarding the biodiversity for centuries so they are also able to prove that they are the ones who are conserving the land.
Abdel Mandili
Priyanka And what about your upcoming documentaries? You’re also doing two other documentaries. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Abdel Yeah, so the other two documentaries that we’re working on are rooted in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
In Indonesia, we have been following an Indigenous young leader who is mobilising his community to fight against gold mining in the northern part of Sumatra. It’s the only ecosystem where the Sumatran tiger, the orangutan, and the black rhino live in the same habitat. A Canadian company is trying to enter that territory to start mining. We follow the challenges this young Indigenous member faces as he tries to bring unity to the community.
In Papua New Guinea, it also started with a workshop we held with the Lovongai community. While we were there, we learnt that they had actually been fighting a civil war among the 12 clans. During the training, it was the first time since reaching a peace agreement that members of different clans, who had once been on opposing sides, were working together using GPS devices and bonding through cameras and drones. It became the first peaceful project after the civil war.
Priyanka Is that the one you call Walk for Peace?
Abdel Yeah. Walk for Peace actually follows the work of John Aini, the community leader who was walking from outpost to outpost to talk to clan leaders and ask them to lay down their arms and unite. There is also a mining company entering their territory, dividing the clans, and causing land disputes as well. That exacerbated the problems, and it became a civil war that had been ongoing since 2006. In 2021, John was able to bring back peace.
In 2022, we did a workshop there, and through the workshop, we discovered this story. We trained a group of 10 Indigenous filmmakers and formed a film crew. Together with the community, we are telling the story of this community leader.
The interesting thing is that the island is like a small-scale example of world politics and global problems in one place. The community leader is trying to bring everyone together to fight collectively against a common enemy—the mining company while also addressing broader climate challenges. The community had to move inland and negotiate with other community members already living there. So, along with climate challenges, there’s destruction and war, all on one island.
It’s always quite fascinating to see how peaceful that island is now, and it’s hard to imagine that a civil war was raging there for more than 10 years.
Priyanka There’s this line in the poster of Walk for Peace, which reads, ‘Floating between hope and fear.’ How do you personally choose hope despite the climate crisis? And why do you think it’s necessary to be hopeful?
Abdel Well, there’s always hope, and without hope, we would never reach anything. If everyone becomes indifferent and hopeless, then change is never going to happen.
Priyanka How does the collective help preserve Indigenous languages?
Abdel Through the films we are preserving Indigenous languages and songs. We need to make sure that it’s documented in the best way possible. So it does not fade away as the elderly people pass. These songs refer to the land and how communities have been safeguarding the biodiversity for centuries so they are also able to prove that they are the ones who are conserving the land.
Priyanka What about written documentation?
Abdel There was a case in the Ogiek community in Kenya, where this centuries-old community song was praising the way they have been living in harmony with the land. The song itself was evidence. In the beginning, the court wasn’t willing to accept it; one of the community members started singing in court, and one of the jury members said, “You can’t sing in my courtroom”, that was the initial reaction.
But the urgency was high; there was hope. That’s why they continue going through it and make sure that it is accepted in the Western legal system because they don’t have any paper or titles. It’s not how they have been preserving their land. For them it’s a communal relationship. The world that we have created with these documentations and land being privately owned. It’s not something that they connect with, and that’s how these two worlds are different.
Priyanka We have lost our connection to nature—it’s as if our memories of that bond have been stolen. The colonial ideologies have been handed down in the Western world. Do you think we can restore them through the stories we share with each other and ourselves?
Abdel Yeah, definitely. I mean, even from my perspective, I was born in Amsterdam. So it’s easy to forget about my ancestral background. But it was through the stories I heard from my grandparents that a seed was planted. Maybe I didn’t fully recognise it when I was young, but it’s something I reconnected with later in life. I think it’s very important to keep telling these stories to each other as well as to next generations so that they are preserved.
Also through film, these stories could be captured and preserved beautifully. That’s why I want to also honour my Indigenous roots with a film from the region, to know where I dig through the essence of what it is to be Indigenous from the Amazigh in North Africa. I think that’s where the most important work lies for me as a filmmaker.
There’s a big responsibility that comes with co-creating these stories in the forest and showing the devastation communities are experiencing: it’s essential to connect that with the consumerism happening here in the city and in the Western world.
Abdel Mandili
Priyanka Also, there’s a strong interconnection between forest and urban communities. For instance, I might buy something at a supermarket without realising it’s harming the land. How can films and storytelling help bridge the gap between these communities, those living in nature and those in cities? We need a deeper connection, not just with nature, but also among each other. How do you envision fostering that connection and creating space to truly hear and share each other’s stories?
Abdel I happen to be in both worlds. The stories we create in the forest are brought to the attention of global audiences at film festivals. Obviously, these festivals reach people who are already somewhat engaged with these topics, but they may forget the conscious choices they need to make when they visit the supermarket about where those products come from. There’s a big responsibility that comes with co-creating these stories in the forest and showing the devastation communities are experiencing: it’s essential to connect that with the consumerism happening here in the city and in the Western world.
Every choice we make has consequences somewhere else. Through impact campaigns, we try to convey this message with our films: not just to watch a story and move on, but to think about how you can contribute. By reflecting on the choices you make that have ripple effects elsewhere. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do in our latest two documentaries: connect those dots.
If you watch a story about a civil war happening in Papua New Guinea, why should you care? Why is it connected to your life? And why is something similar happening in your own backyard? That’s a creative challenge we need to get right. It’s a big responsibility because I don’t want to be part of an echo chamber that only reaches people who already know or care about these issues. How do you engage the silent majority?
That means approaching unconventional ways of showing films and running awareness campaigns in places where people aren’t expecting to watch them to engage a new audience. And that’s a whole different challenge.
The way we treat the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin, or the forests of Southeast Asia, with extractive industries destroying them, we see the consequences in our own part of the world too.
Abdel Mandili
Priyanka By safeguarding indigenous communities, we also protect forests, rivers, and territories essential for the planet’s overall health. How do you see it connected to the well-being of all the humans and more-than-humans?
Abdel Yeah, it’s a very difficult question to answer.
Priyanka Take your time to reflect on this, especially in the context of biodiversity. In our conversation, you mentioned that Indigenous people have to prove they are the ones safeguarding the environment. That struck me—it’s something I hadn’t heard before. It feels strange because, to me, protecting your home should be natural. If you could shed more light on biodiversity preservation, I think that would help answer my question.
Abdel Okay, yeah. Like I said, Indigenous people have been protecting the forests because they’re their home, their pharmacy, and their library. Their whole existence depends on standing trees and crystal-clear rivers flowing for their livelihood. There are many studies showing that in places where Indigenous communities have full agency, biodiversity thrives and endangered species are recovering. Rivers are preserved, and trees are standing. That’s where the solution lies.
With us facing climate change, rising sea levels, and extreme droughts, it’s all connected. The way we treat the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin, or the forests of Southeast Asia, with extractive industries destroying them, we see the consequences in our own part of the world too.
I think we need to move away from the Western model of conservationism. Most of the time, this fortress conservation is looking at human interaction and nature, which cannot coexist together. It’s one or the other. But Indigenous people have proven that nature is part of their livelihood. For us, nature is something that we plant within fences. But they know how to live and coexist with nature in harmony without extracting from it. And that’s where the solutions lie.
If we give Indigenous communities the agency to protect these forests and live in balance with nature, not only do we all benefit as a global population, but we also find a way to navigate the climate disasters we face. We can learn from Indigenous people how to coexist with the forest. And then a whole new world will open up to us, something we’ve forgotten in the Western world.
