When the Sacred Land Film Project was started in 1984, our original vision was to document indigenous cultures around the world struggling to protect spiritually important places — to illustrate the universality of these conflicts and to show that sacred sites are important to people all over the planet.

In the 1990s, this proved to be an ambitious idea whose time had not quite arrived. We first needed to develop relationships with Native American communities we were already working with, articulate our arguments, distill the message, develop a funding base, and prove that we could make effective films that successfully tell these delicate, complex stories. Though it took ten years, in collaboration with native communities we produced the award-wining public television documentary In the Light of Reverence — along with a website containing extensive educational materials. That body of work is a preview of what we can do globally for sacred places if we can find the right combination of timely stories to tell.

Today, there is rapidly growing international interest in the issues of biodiversity and cultural landscapes, and a sense of urgency about threats to sacred places. Indigenous people are asserting their land rights on every continent and we believe these stories need to be documented on film in a comprehensive, global portrait of sacred land struggles.

We are currently looking for stories about indigenous people fighting to protect their sacred sites. We seek places of ecological significance that are central to the survival of indigenous cultures. From the many important stories out there we will select complementary themes distributed geographically for inclusion in our new documentary film Losing Sacred Ground.

If you have a story about a threatened sacred place to share with us, please answer the following questions as concisely as possible. Thank you!