This film is the prayer of the Guarani-Kaiowa

Flowers of the Earth

Join us for the Santa Cruz premiere of SAND's "Flowers of the Earth" followed by a Q&A with directors Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo.

Doors open at 6 PM. Film begins at 6:30 PM.

This is a rare opportunity to experience the film in community, on a big screen and share a conversation with the film directors.

Flowers of the Earth - Brazil (Mato Grosso do Sul)

They call themselves Flowers of the Earth. In the red-soil heart of Brazil, the Guarani-Kaiowá fight with prayer, with seed, and with their own blood to return to the mother who bore them: the land itself.

"Water lives in our bodies," a Kaiowá poet once said. "It evaporates into the air, becomes a cloud of love, falls as rain, sprouts the buds, blooms the flowers. We are Nature."

For the Guarani-Kaiowá of Mato Grosso do Sul, there is no line where the body ends and the land begins. The earth is their skin, the tree their umbilicus, the mountains the bones of a living mother. But for over a century, that mother has been fenced, burned, mined, and poisoned, her children pushed onto slivers of the territory that once held them all.

The film listens to the elders who remember the forest before the farmers came, before the native were clearcut and the living land was carved into square plots of a single endless crop. It walks with the healers, whose prayer is constant as breath, and with the young women leading the Retomada, the return to ancestral land. The Guarani-Kaiowá are a people who refuse to vanish. Their story is a struggle for survival, but more than that: a love between a people and their earth, and a quiet, defiant invitation to the world to reforest not only the land, but the mind.

Everyone is welcome.

Complimentary tickets are available to ensure no one is turned away for lack of funds. Click here to secure your complimentary ticket.

Ticket donations support both RCNV and SAND's vital work, and 50% of proceeds after film production costs directly fund Indigenous-led initiatives in the featured communities.

Content Advisory & Our Commitment to Care:

The films in this series honor the profound resilience of Indigenous cultures while addressing the brutal legacies of colonization. They may include references to physical and sexual violence, substance abuse, and intergenerational trauma. We acknowledge that this content can be deeply impactful, especially for those with lived or inherited experiences of such trauma.

To foster a respectful environment for all attendees, we will share clear Community Agreements at each screening. These include guidelines on privacy, consent, respectful sharing, and the right to exit and re-enter the space as needed. Our goal is to create a container where learning and reflection can happen with care for everyone's well-being.

About the Resource Center for Nonviolence & SAND:

For 50 years, the Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) has equipped our community with tools to build a just and peaceful world. We're proud to collaborate with Science and Nonduality (SAND)—an organization exploring our interconnectedness and humanity's place within the web of life—to host the Santa Cruz Premieres of the Wisdom of the Ancestors/Eternal Song film series. These films hold transformative power, and we believe viewing and contemplating them together can help disrupt cycles of violence and nurture Beloved Community.

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