IHAMBA: A Film about Uganda's Conservation Refugees (Screening w/ Director Q&A)

IHAMBA is a powerful, character-driven documentary that traces the enduring connection between the Batwa tribe and the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of southwestern Uganda. Once known as forest peoples, the Batwa were forcibly evicted from their homelands in the early 1990s when ihamba — the word for “forest” in the local language — was gazetted as a national park for mountain gorilla conservation. Since then, they have endured extreme poverty, cultural erasure, criminalization, and even death for attempting to return to their ancestral lands to access food, medicine, and spiritual sites.

Told through the voices of Batwa elders, youth, and community leaders, IHAMBA is a story of memory, resilience, and resistance. Through intimate interviews, lyrical visuals, and collaborative storytelling, the film explores what was lost when the Batwa were removed from their homeland, and what still survives in the stories and dreams of those determined to keep their heritage alive. Co-created with Batwa storytellers, it challenges exclusionary conservation and calls for a future where Indigenous rights and stewardship thrive together.

More about the film here: https://www.ihambaproject.com/

About the Director:

David Borish is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at Memorial University, a social science researcher and visual artist who uses documentary film to co-explore and communicate an array of environmental, social, and health issues in collaboration with underrepresented communities. As an award-winning filmmaker that has a PhD in Public Health & International Development, his visual work is grounded in evidence-based research. David has worked with wildlife co-management boards across the Canadian Arctic to co-create visual media about Indigenous knowledge of species like polar bears, caribou, and beluga. He has also worked with Indigenous communities on socio-ecological film projects in Uganda, Kenya, Nepal, Malaysia, Peru, and other parts of the world. He manages Cloudberry Connections and is part of the Explorers Club’s annual “50 People Changing the World” class of 2023. (LinkedIn)

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This is a screening of the film IHAMBA followed by a Q&A with Co-Director David Borish, presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free refreshments will be provided at the event. Sometimes we look for each other after the talk for further discussion about the topic.

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai