Blog - Homelands Productions

October 22, 2026

Tolan’s latest book exposes bitter history

Bittersweet Empire will be published on January 26, 2027 by HarperCollins.

Homelands’ co-founder and award-winning investigative journalist Sandy Tolan‘s latest book exposes the bitter history behind the secretive sugar industry and the billionaire family that owns Domino Sugar and Florida Crystals.

From the HarperCollins press release:

For well over a century, deep-pocketed sugar barons have accumulated billions of dollars in wealth. Meanwhile, their offshore cane cutters live in ramshackle villages, become deeply indebted seeking medical care for injuries they incur on the job, and are considered lucky if they earn more than four dollars a day. In Florida, toxic smoke rises from the cane fields and endangers the health of the local populace during annual controlled burnings, while discharges of polluted water threaten coastal communities and the survival of the Everglades.

Of the families that have profited the most from the historically brutal sugar industry, none is more prosperous or notorious than the Fanjuls. Their epic history blazes a path of environmental destruction and social upheaval, through the Cuban Revolution, exile and resettlement in sparkling Palm Beach, and the acquisition of more than four hundred thousand acres of sugarcane fields from the Everglades to the Dominican Republic. Through millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying both Democrats and Republicans, their influence stretches all the way to the White House—no matter who occupies it.

Drawing on more than five years of on-the-ground reporting, Sandy Tolan juxtaposes the family’s immense fortune with the lives of the people and communities that made it possible. His reporting, alongside Dominican-Haitian journalist Euclides Cordero Nuel, helped prompt the U.S. Department of Labor to block sugar imports from the Fanjuls’ Dominican operations over findings of forced labor.

Eye-opening and meticulously reported, Bittersweet Empire shines a light on the most influential family you’ve likely never heard of, giving a critical voice to those whose stories have been silenced across generations.

August 5, 2026

Nuisance Bear wins Herzog Award

Nuisance Bear, a feature-length documentary directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden of Documist, has won the 2026 Werner Herzog Film Award, a prestigious prize conferred on one film each year by the director Werner Herzog. Homelands served as the film’s fiscal sponsor. The award ceremony will take place on December 18 in Munich.

The rest of this post is reproduced from the Herzog Foundation announcement.

The film centers on the annual polar bear incursions into towns of Churchill, Manitoba, and Arviat Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic. Regarded as unwanted neighbors, the bears are driven away while also having to contend with hordes of tourists, hunters, and wildlife conservation officers. They ultimately seek refuge at the town’s landfill.

The story is interwoven with the personal tragedy of an Inuit Elder, who serves as the film’s narrator in his native language, Inuktitut. It is not only the bears who pay the price for the profoundly troubled relationship between civilization and wildlife. The film also draws a parallel to the heavy price paid by the Indigenous Inuit for a settlement that exists solely to serve commercial interests.

The film presents an entirely new perspective without ever becoming didactic: Are we not, in fact, the true nuisance—the real intruders? NUISANCE BEAR is a courageous film: refreshingly youthful and truly groundbreaking. Through its beauty, its sorrow, and its profound insight, it reaches far beyond anything one would ordinarily expect from a wildlife film.

NUISANCE BEAR is a feature-length documentary directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden. Depicting the complex relationship between polar bears and humans in Churchill, the film expands on their acclaimed short film of the same title (2022). It premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.

June 25, 2026

“Cool Shoes” debuts at Tribeca

Jonathan Miller‘s short audio piece about a young Kenyan inventor and his mother debuted before a live audience at the Tribeca Festival in June. The piece was one of four Audio Flux “circuit selects” chosen by an international jury from among 97 entries from around the world. It also aired on the public radio program The World.

You can listen to it here.

“Cool Shoes” tells the story of Jacob “Teddy” Omondi, a 23-year-old self-trained engineer who created a pair of multifunction sneakers out of discarded electronic parts. The shoes were fitted out with vibrators from old cell phones, fans from junk laptops, lights, a charging port, and a Bluetooth music player. They were inspired by Teddy’s mother, Sarah Okoth, who works as a street vendor in the western Kenya city of Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, and whose feet are often hot and tired at the end of the day.

Audio Flux calls itself “a home for innovative, short-form audio and bold storytelling.” The group periodically invites audio makers to create short works inspired by a set of prompts. The resulting “fluxworks” reach audiences in live events, online, across social channels, and on the Audio Flux Podcast. This round’s theme was “Trash or Treasure.” Pieces had to connect in some way to climate change, include one clip of audio from a set of provided recordings, and clock in at exactly three minutes long.

January 30, 2026

Nuisance Bear wins grand prize at Sundance

The documentary film Nuisance Bear has won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The film is a fiscally sponsored project of Homelands.

Directed by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman of Documist, Nuisance Bear looks at the relationship between polar bears, residents, tourists, wildlife officers, and First Nations communities in northern Manitoba, Canada. The film had its world premiere at Sundance on January 24. The festival organizers described it as “a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.”

The Washington Post (subscription required) called Nuisance Bear “riveting” and “an edge-of-your-seat thriller.” After attending the premiere at Sundance, the Post’s reviewer, Jada Yuan, wrote that it “produced the kind of audience reactions usually reserved for midnight horror films, with the entire theater shouting commands to the screen or cheering in unison.”

The Wrap called it “visually breathtaking” while POV Magazine called it “a grand fable, masterfully told, about loneliness and connection in a faraway land that hits close to home.”

The feature-length film grows out of an award-winning 2022 short for The New Yorker produced by the same team. Homelands also sponsored Documist’s documentary The Territory, which premiered at Sundance in 2022. The Territory won two awards at the festival and went on to win an Emmy, a Peabody, and other prizes. It was bought by National Geographic and is available for streaming on Disney+.

Visit the Sundance website to learn more about Nuisance Bear and the filmmakers.

January 30, 2026

Raid destroys musical instruments

On Monday, January 26, 2026, Israeli forces ransacked the Al Kamandjâti Center in the Qalandia Refugee Camp in the West Bank near Jerusalem and destroyed all the musical instruments there. The center, which teaches music to Palestinian children, is part of the Women’s Programs Center in the camp. The soldiers also did extensive damage to the center’s facilities.

In an email to supporters, the center’s leadership called the raid part of Israel’s “systemic destruction of cultural life in Palestine.”

Homelands’ senior producer Sandy Tolan produced two radio stories for NPR’s Weekend Edition about Al Kamandjâti and its founder, the Ramallah-born musician, composer, and conductor Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan. “The Stone and the Viola” aired in 1998 and “Ramzi’s Story: Laying Down Stones and Picking up Instruments” aired in 2010. Sandy expanded his reporting in his 2015 book Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land.

Al Kamandjâti was established in 2002 and now operates several programs for young musicians in Palestine and Europe.

“For more than 18 years, the center [in Qalandia] has served as a vital cultural and educational space for children, youth, and women, providing music education, artistic activities, and women’s programs to the camp and surrounding communities,” the center wrote in its email. “This brutal attack comes as part of the ongoing targeting of cultural and community institutions.”

Those interested in making a tax-deductible donation to Al Kamandjâti can find instructions here.

November 9, 2025

Border Chronicle receives MacArthur grant

The Border Chronicle, an independent newsroom in Tucson, Arizona, has received a $350,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation “to support its original on-the-ground reporting, with context and analysis, on issues important to borderland communities.”

The Border Chronicle is one of Homelands’ fiscally sponsored projects.

The grant is part of more than $6 million in new funding to eight organizations “that are working to address the unique challenges local news and information environments face along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

The announcement came in a press release from the foundation’s Local News grantmaking program.

Led by veteran journalists Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller, The Border Chronicle produces a weekly Substack newsletter and podcast. Homelands’ fiscal sponsorship allows it to receive tax-deductible grants and donations. You can learn more, subscribe, and donate here.

November 9, 2025

Weisman wins climate innovation award

Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman has won a Climate Innovation Award from the Climate Change Leadership Institute. CCLI Executive Director Robb Hirsch issued the following announcement:

“In his recent book Hope Dies Last, Alan states the dire facts of our climate emergency while focusing on the incredible promise of visionary people & revolutionary ideas! Some are out of the box thinking; others are proven pathways swiftly rising and/or transforming the status quo. Whether growing mangroves or offshore sustainable cities; budding techniques like Pivot Bio helping avoid nitrous oxide emissions from toxic fertilizers or vastly populating climate refugee camps bunny hopping industrialization by using distributed solar, electric scooters & mobile lap tops—we have vast opportunities to prevail over the climate crisis if only we seize the day!”

CCLI describes itself as “a New Mexico based nonprofit organization helping lead and generate America’s next great revolution for sustainable development, pollution-free energy and climate stewardship.”

Hope Dies Last was published by Dutton on Earth Day 2025.

September 15, 2025

Alan Weisman speaks at National Book Festival

In a conversation broadcast on C-SPAN, Homelands senior producer Alan Weisman spoke with climate scientist and author Kate Marvel about climate change and efforts to understand environmental science and history. Marvel’s debut book, Human Nature, was published in June. Alan’s latest book, Hope Dies Last, was published in April.

You can watch the hour-long discussion here.

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About Homelands

WHAT WE ARE

Homelands Productions is an independent nonprofit journalism cooperative. Since our founding in 1989, we have reported from more than 60 countries, produced nine special series for public radio and television, and won 22 national and international awards.

We also serve as a nonprofit fiscal sponsor for projects that excite us, and our Public Interest Reporting Defense Fund helps journalists whose work has gotten them in trouble.