Film Screening: OVERBURDEN
OVERBURDEN is a feature-length documentary set in the mist-shrouded Nimba Mountains on the Liberia–Guinea border, where rare wildlife and local communities reclaim a landscape scarred by mining. Today, this fragile recovery faces a new threat: a global steel company using conservation promises to brand a new mining venture as green.
With exclusive, on-the-ground access, OVERBURDEN follows rangers, scientists, and forest defenders—like Moses Darpey, a hunter turned ranger—as they navigate the tangled frontier where mining meets conservation, and where memory, science, and power collide. The film captures intimate encounters with the mountain's extraordinary inhabitants, from a viviparous toad found nowhere else on earth to resilient cave-dwelling bats and adaptive chimpanzees.
OVERBURDEN tells a powerful story of resilience and transformation in a landscape shaped by industry yet alive with possibility. Through vivid cinematography and deeply rooted storytelling, the film follows communities and nature enduring and adapting in the face of relentless global forces. OVERBURDEN celebrates the power of mutual aid, showing how people and ecosystems persist, rebuild, and thrive against overwhelming odds.
About the speakers
Shadrach Kerwillain is a graduate of the University of Liberia, where he developed his passion for biology, Shadrach earned a Master’s degree in Conservation Leadership from the University of Cambridge. With more than a decade of experience as a conservation practitioner for Fauna & Flora International, Liberia, Shadrach is committed to finding solutions in advancing biodiversity conservation that work for local people and the environment. He has taught conservation biology at the University of Liberia and is a mentor for many young Liberians seeking professional careers in natural resource management. Shadrach is completing a PhD in Environment and Society at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
Sarita West (Director) is a New Zealand–born documentary filmmaker who founded Alchemy Films in 1994. After early experience in feature films, music videos and her own 35mm short fiction, she was drawn to documentary to explore social and environmental justice in an era of rapid planetary transformation. Frequently collaborating with educators and local film crews, Sarita crafts films that are both impactful and rooted in community, inviting audiences toward deeper social engagement. Her previous titles include The Disenchanted Forest, Fire Burn Babylon, In the Shadow of Ebola, The Waste Commons, and The Land Beneath Our Feet. Her work has been broadcast internationally on National Geographic Channels, PBS Independent Lens, Discovery Canada, Canal+ and ARTE.
Gregg Mitman (Creative Producer) is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and teacher, whose books, essays, and films explore the historical intersections between science, medicine, and the environment. Since 2012, he has pursued research and built partnerships in Liberia that led to the making of two films, In the Shadow of Ebola (2015) and The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016), and a book, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (2021). His current research project, Fragments of the Forest, of which Overburden is a part, investigates the convergences between resource extraction, biodiversity conservation, and emerging infectious disease threats in the Upper Guinean Forest of West Africa. His research is funded by the European Research Council.