Category
Documentary
director
Maartje Nevejan
production
Alma Films
country
The Netherlands
format
HD, DCP
runtime
105 min
year
2026
language
English, Dutch, Spanish
subtitles
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian
genre
Documentary, Spirituality, Human Interest, Green

Synopsis

This feature documentary by Maartje Nevejan dives into the deep waters of grief—not only personal, but ecological, colonial, and spiritual. Sparked by the loss of her partner and the grief of her children in the face of ecological collapse, Nevejan resists centering her own story. Instead, she opens a space for something larger: a cinematic ritual that gathers three remarkable women—grief doulas, ritualists, spiritual disruptors—who guide others not toward closure, but transformation. In collaboration with visionary ecologist Dr. Monica Gagliano and Zen priest and grief pioneer Roshi Joan Halifax, JUST OUR HEART expands the mourning room. It invites voices that are usually silenced: the dead, the exploited, the Earth herself. This is a film that doesn’t offer answers—it invites participation in something older than language: ritual as a way of relating to loss, and as a method of resistance. JUST OUR HEART refuses the neat aesthetics of healing as an endpoint. It challenges us to ask: What if our hearts are not broken, but breaking open? And what happens when, in that rupture, we do not turn away—but stay? The film zooms out as we witness the grief from children to adults, to mother earth herself. In these troubling times, without mentioning the specifics, JUST OUR HEART is call to stay with the wound, crack open a little more, protest and open our hearts to all of it.