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Behind-the-Scenes 'Revenant' Doc Puts 'Greed' of Fur Trade Into Focus

If The Revenant sparked your curiosity about the American frontier and Native American history, there’s much to think about in A World Unseen, a new documentary (watch it above) about the making of the 12-time Oscar nominee.

More than a look into the bitter cold that filmmakers and actors endured — though it’s that, too — the 45-minute companion piece attempts to connect the dots on themes touched upon in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s lauded film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as frontiersman Hugh Glass. The doc weaves together an impression of how westward expansion during the fur trade decimated both natural resources and indigenous populations.

DiCaprio, an active environmentalist, goes as far as to say The Revenant is a reflection on what we’ve done to our planet, dramatizing “the first steps toward this massive undertaking mankind has put forth to extract resources from our environment—and at what cost?”

Read More: 20 Questions With ‘The Revenant’ Breakout Star Forrest Goodluck

The new doc also delves into the personal perspectives and histories of Native American actors who appear in Iñárritu’s film, including Forrest Goodluck, who plays Glass’s half Pawnee son, and who says Native Americans have been grossly misrepresented in Hollywood. A World Unseen follows the young actor on a visit to Fort Berthed Reservation in North Dakota during production to explore his ancestral land. A dam built there displaced many of his ancestors. “It’s a deep wound for a lot of people who live here,” he notes.

“I think we are still digging and cutting and extracting every natural resource we can,” Iñárritu says later in the film. “But I don’t know when we will understand that until we kill the last animal, and we eat the last fish, and we cut the last tree. We will [then] understand that we are not able to eat money.”