Just Our Heart collects rituals and stories of human, ecological and colonial grief in order to set the experience of loss in a context of meaning for us who remain.

Just Our Heart is not only a comforting shoulder—it’s a ritual blade. 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, and open our hearts to all of it.

OPENING WILL BE IN FALL/WINTER 2025

Visit the new website JUST OUR HEART to find more information about this film, the making off and the team.