Since she stunned the world for six minutes at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, Severn Cullis-Suzuki has not stopped filling orders for video copies of the speech on the environment that she gave to world leaders.

“What I would be interested in doing now, especially with the advent of YouTube, is giving a parallel speech—myself and just short—and speaking to the same issues from the point of a new mother, which is my perspective today,” Cullis-Suzuki, now 30, told the Straight in an interview by phone from her Haida Gwaii home. “It is such a fundamentally different perspective, and yet I am now more than ever invested in fighting for the future.”

French director Jean-Paul Jaud has taken the speech made by the then–12-year-old Suzuki and spliced it in with new footage of the daughter of Vancouver environmental activist David Suzuki. Along with interviews of activists from around the world, the two-hour documentary called Severn, The Voice of Our Children will screen at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 5 and 7.

“They came to Haida Gwaii twice last year,” Cullis-Suzuki said of the French crew. “So I was about eight months pregnant when they interviewed me for the first part, and then I came back in the fall when I had my little three-month-old [Ganhlaans Suzuki-Brown].”

Meanwhile, 75-year-old David Suzuki is the subject of the long-awaited documentary Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Story, directed by Toronto-based and self-identified “Vancouver boy” Sturla Gunnarsson. (The film plays at VIFF on October 6 and 7.)

“We get quite a few laughs, but it is quite moving in places,” Gunnarsson told the Straight by phone from Toronto. “It moves through time. It goes from 1940 through to 2010. It’s, like, all of the key historical moments, he’s there.”

During the film’s 93 minutes, the audience will relive the Suzuki family’s Second World War internment in B.C., its relocation, and the emergence of David, notably at UBC, where Gunnarsson was a student.

“I never met him, and everyone knew David, but I never shook his hand or anything else,” Gunnarsson said. “He was way out there, talking about genetics in a way that sounded like [poet William] Blake. It was accessible and poetic and exciting, and he was kind of at the forefront of a cultural revolution, and he was at the forefront of the environmental movement, and he was quite radical in his views at the time, as was I, so I felt a kindred spirit. But, you know, then 30 years go by.”