A World Worth Exploring

CORE returns to Exploration Film Festival Davos with stories that deepen our understanding of ourselves, one another and the planet we share.

A river connects the communities of a threatened valley in Spain. Explorers journey toward the North Pole. Wild horses move across a remote island in the North Atlantic. A mathematician looks for hidden patterns connecting our world. Across forests, oceans, mountains and remote communities, people encounter wildlife, cultures and ways of understanding life far removed from their own.

These stories unfold across dramatically different landscapes and disciplines, yet they share something fundamental: curiosity and the willingness to look more closely. Today CORE returns to Exploration Film Festival Davos in Switzerland, continuing a collaboration that began with the festival’s inaugural edition and expanding its presence with a broad selection of films exploring nature, culture, science, conservation, human potential and discovery.

For CORE, the collaboration offers another way to fulfill its mission of making meaningful storytelling, knowledge and opportunities to learn accessible to audiences around the world. Exploration does not end when we reach a destination. Its lasting value often comes from what happens afterward, when an experience changes what we notice, what we question and how we understand the world around us.

The vision behind the festival

Exploration Film Festival Davos grew from founder Marcelo Garcia’s experience across media, exploration and cultural gatherings. Over time, Garcia recognized that films about oceans, forests, polar regions, wildlife, conservation, science and human exploration often existed in separate worlds. A marine film might reach one audience, a polar expedition another, and a cultural documentary another still. The festival brings those worlds together, creating connections between subjects and audiences that might otherwise rarely meet.

The Exploration Film Festival also marks the opening of the season in Davos, bringing cinema centered on science, exploration and the natural world into the cultural life surrounding the beginning of the ski season. At the other end of the season, Garcia’s Wisdom Festival creates a complementary gathering in spring, turning toward spirituality, ancient knowledge, consciousness and questions that science and exploration cannot always fully explain.

The two festivals are designed to walk hand in hand. Exploration Film Festival looks outward toward expeditions, science, nature and the physical world, while the Wisdom Festival extends that curiosity toward the less easily explained dimensions of human experience. Together, they create natural bookends to the Davos season and two complementary ways of asking many of the same questions: What do we know? What remains unknown? What can exploration teach us about the world, and what can wisdom teach us about ourselves?

Set amid the Swiss Alps, the festival creates a public meeting place for filmmakers, explorers, scientists, researchers, families and audiences to experience stories collectively and continue the conversation beyond the screen. Environmental and human questions rarely exist in isolation. A story about water can also be a story about community, livelihoods and the future of a place. A portrait of an endangered animal can raise larger questions about biodiversity and our responsibility toward the natural world.

Bringing these perspectives into one festival creates an opportunity to see relationships between subjects that are often considered separately. Exploration becomes more than adventure or travel. It becomes a way of understanding how people, places, ecosystems and ideas intersect.

Why CORE belongs in this conversation

CORE Foundation founder and chair Martine Dubin and festival founder Marcelo Garcia are explorers and fellow members of The Explorers Club. Their own experiences traveling, participating in expeditions and filming in remote places helped inspire a collaboration centered on bringing the knowledge and perspectives discovered through exploration to broader audiences.

CORE approaches that mission through storytelling, education and access. A film can take someone somewhere they may never physically travel, introduce them to a person they would otherwise never meet, reveal an ecosystem they may never see firsthand or present an idea they had never considered. When those stories remain accessible beyond a single screening, their ability to inspire curiosity and learning can continue long after the lights come back on.

Through CORE’s global streaming platforms and distribution relationships, films and series can continue reaching audiences throughout the year. The Exploration Film Festival adds a different dimension to that reach. A public screening creates a shared experience, bringing people with different backgrounds into the same room to encounter a story together and giving them something to discuss afterward. The festival and the streaming experience therefore complement one another: one creates the moment of discovery, while the other allows that discovery to continue.

A Saturday of exploration in Davos and Klosters

This year’s program takes place with two distinct experiences. During the morning, a special children and families edition at Kulturhuus Klosters introduces younger audiences to stories about wildlife, oceans and the surprising ways animals experience the world. Later that day, the program moves to the Davos Congress Centre for an evening of films exploring some of CORE’s broader themes of exploration, nature, climate, creativity and human possibility.

The Saturday evening selection includes Chasing Wild Horses, Into the Cold: A Journey of the Soul, Muga: When She Stops Flowing, So Will We and the Robert Edward Grant documentary. Together, the films move across radically different forms of exploration, from the Arctic and Sable Island to environmental regeneration in Catalonia and the search for patterns connecting mathematics, geometry, creativity and our understanding of the world.

Among the featured works, Into the Cold: A Journey of the Soul follows fellow Explorers Club member, polar explorer, photographer and environmental advocate Sebastian Copeland and expedition partner Keith Heger on their extraordinary journey toward the North Pole. The physical demands of the expedition are immense, but the landscape also turns exploration inward. Isolation, endurance and the scale of the Arctic create a story not simply about reaching one of the most extreme places on Earth, but about what such a journey can reveal about human determination and our relationship with a rapidly changing planet.

That relationship between people and place takes another form in The Pioneers of Our Time Foundation and We Are the ReGeneration? Muga: When She Stops Flowing, So Will We. In Catalonia, Spain, Stef van Dongen brings together communities, scientists and collaborators across the Muga Valley to address drought, biodiversity loss and the long term resilience of a landscape encompassing 100,000 hectares and 68 communities. Here, exploration means understanding a place deeply enough to begin repairing it. The film asks what can happen when scientific knowledge, local experience and collective action are brought together around the future of a shared landscape.

The Robert Edward Grant documentary moves exploration beyond geography. Mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy and creativity become territories of discovery as Grant searches for patterns and relationships across disciplines that are often considered separately. His journey asks audiences to consider whether some of what appears random or disconnected may simply reflect patterns we have not yet learned to recognize.

On Sable Island, artist and photographer Roberto Dutesco’s Chasing Wild Horses demonstrates another form of sustained exploration: returning to a place again and again, observing it closely and using art to bring a remote ecosystem into public consciousness. His relationship with the island and its wild horses illustrates how attention itself can become a form of exploration and how photography and film can create an emotional connection between audiences and places they may never experience firsthand.

Introducing exploration to children and families

A new dimension of this year’s festival is its special focus on children and families. The morning program at Kulturhuus Klosters creates an opportunity for younger viewers to encounter the natural world through stories designed to inspire curiosity about wildlife, oceans, ecosystems and the often surprising ways animals experience their environments.

The Trees of Life, A Day on the Reef: Sipadan, Little Penguin Love Island, Last Stand of the Javan Rhino and The Whale Who Saved Me take audiences from forests and coral reefs to endangered species and remarkable encounters between humans and wildlife. Several titles within the broader selection originated with CuriosityStream and WaterBear productions and now form part of the wider body of storytelling available through CORE and its distribution relationships.

For children, these films can provide an early introduction to exploration without requiring them to travel beyond the theater. A coral reef can reveal an extraordinary network of life and interdependence. An endangered rhino can become a way of beginning to understand biodiversity and extinction. Penguins, whales and other animals can inspire questions about behavior, habitat and the relationships between species and their environments.

The intention is not simply to teach children facts about animals. It is to encourage the habit of looking more closely. Curiosity about a whale, penguin or coral reef can become the beginning of a larger interest in oceans, science, conservation and the living world. Storytelling gives children an accessible way into those subjects by beginning with wonder.

Film makes those encounters portable. A camera can carry a remote ecosystem, a threatened species or an extraordinary moment far beyond the place where it occurred. A young audience in Klosters can encounter a landscape thousands of miles away, while a family watching through CORE elsewhere in the world can later experience that same story. That movement of knowledge and experience from one person and place to another is central to both exploration and education.

Taking exploration into the classroom

CORE and Exploration Film Festival are also beginning to look beyond the festival itself. The new children and families program creates an opportunity to open more of the CORE collection to younger audiences and explore how selected films, series and educational content could become useful resources for schools in Davos and the surrounding Graubünden region.

The idea is to extend the experience from a single festival screening into something children and educators can continue exploring throughout the school year. Stories about wildlife, oceans, climate, culture and exploration can become starting points for classroom conversations about science, geography, conservation and the wider world.

CORE’s growing educational platform, CORE+, can add another dimension to that experience. Selected films can be accompanied by learning journeys and educational materials that encourage students not simply to watch, but to ask questions, investigate subjects more deeply and connect what they see on screen with what they are learning in school.

The collaboration is still at an early stage, but its direction reflects a shared ambition between CORE and the festival: to introduce meaningful stories to children early, encourage curiosity about the world around them and create opportunities for that curiosity to continue beyond the theater and into education.

From Exploration to Wisdom

The collaboration between CORE and Marcelo Garcia’s festivals will continue beyond November. When the Davos ski season approaches its close in spring 2027, the Wisdom Festival will continue the journey through stories focused more closely on spirituality, ancient knowledge, consciousness, human experience and the questions that science and exploration cannot always fully explain.

Book of Knowledge: Journey of a Wayfarer is planned to be featured during the Wisdom Festival. David Verdesi travels across the Asia Pacific, encountering monks, shamans, philosophers and ancient traditions in places including Java, Borneo, China and Bhutan. His physical journey becomes a search for knowledge, meaning and a deeper understanding of human possibility, inviting viewers to consider how much of what we believe is shaped by the world immediately around us and what can happen when we become willing to encounter knowledge through another culture’s experience.

The Wisdom Festival will also provide a natural setting to feature CORE’s Growing Up series, which follows teenagers and young people in communities around the world as they encounter traditions, challenges and responsibilities associated with becoming adults. Across very different cultures and landscapes, the details vary dramatically, but the larger questions are immediately recognizable: how communities define readiness, responsibility and belonging, and how young people understand the traditions and obligations they inherit.

Together, the Exploration Film Festival and Wisdom Festival create a continuing conversation. Science and spirituality, the explainable and the unexplained, the physical world and human experience are not presented as opposing ideas, but as different ways people have always sought to understand themselves and the world around them. One festival invites audiences to explore what can be observed, documented and discovered in the world around us; the other creates room for questions that remain more mysterious.

What these stories reveal together

Seen individually, the films in the CORE selection span remarkably different subjects. Seen together, connections begin to emerge. A polar expedition becomes a story about endurance and climate. A river becomes a story about community and regeneration. Mathematics becomes a frontier for exploration. Wildlife becomes a way of understanding responsibility, while stories created for younger audiences can become an introduction to science, conservation and a lifelong interest in the natural world.

This is part of the value of bringing seemingly different stories into the same conversation. An audience member may arrive because of an interest in polar exploration and discover biodiversity. Someone drawn to wildlife may encounter a story about environmental regeneration. A viewer interested in science may leave thinking about philosophy, while a child fascinated by a penguin or whale may begin asking questions about oceans, ecosystems and conservation.

A carefully curated festival can therefore create value beyond the individual films it screens. Subjects that might normally live in separate categories begin speaking to one another. Conservation connects with culture. Science connects with human behavior. Exploration connects with education. The boundaries between disciplines become less important than the questions they share.

Curiosity moves across those boundaries naturally, and meaningful storytelling gives it somewhere to go.

From global streaming to a shared public experience

Streaming has transformed the way stories travel. A documentary no longer needs to disappear when its festival run ends, and a film discovered during one Saturday in Davos or Klosters can continue reaching audiences across countries, cultures and generations. CORE’s streaming platform and distribution relationships allow many of these stories to continue their journey throughout the year, giving viewers opportunities to discover them beyond a single festival schedule.

The festival provides something equally important: a reason to gather. Watching alone and watching together are different experiences. A public screening gives a story a moment in time and a community around it. Conversations can begin in the theater and continue afterward through further viewing, learning and exploration.

That combination is central to the collaboration between CORE and Exploration Film Festival Davos. The festival can introduce someone to a filmmaker, explorer, scientist, idea or unfamiliar part of the world. CORE can help that interest continue by making stories and related learning opportunities accessible beyond the event itself.

For filmmakers and storytellers, that continuity also matters. A festival screening can be a powerful introduction, but stories often require time to find their audiences. Year round availability gives a film the opportunity to be discovered again and again, sometimes by viewers far removed from the audience for which it was originally imagined.

Exploration as a way of seeing

The most meaningful journeys do not necessarily end when we return home. Their influence can remain in the questions we ask, the subjects we become interested in and the way we see what was already around us.

Exploration can happen across an ice field, beneath the surface of an ocean, beside a threatened river or within an unfamiliar culture. It can happen through mathematics, philosophy, art, science or a conversation that challenges something we thought we understood. For children, it can begin with discovering how an animal lives. For adults, it may begin with reconsidering something familiar from an entirely different perspective. What connects these experiences is a willingness to look more closely and remain open to discovering something we did not expect.

That idea sits at the heart of CORE’s continuing collaboration with Exploration Film Festival Davos and, looking ahead, the Wisdom Festival. By bringing stories to audiences on the big screen and allowing many of them to continue traveling through CORE afterward, the collaboration connects the immediacy of a shared public experience with the possibility of ongoing discovery and education.

The landscapes may be distant, the cultures unfamiliar and the questions complex, but exploration ultimately brings us back to something shared: the desire to understand more about the world we inhabit and our place within it.

Sometimes discovery begins with traveling somewhere extraordinary. Just as often, it begins by learning to see the world differently.

Discover CORE

Explore Exploration Film Festival Davos

Return to blog page