“We were worn down by the internet’s endless disposable stream of information and wanted to create something that has true value,” says journalist Darrell Hartman of Jungles in Paris, the globe-trotting collective and travel platform he launched with his documentary-maker brother Oliver in 2013. “The emphasis is on things that are endangered by the modern world, so not entirely tied to the immediate historical moment.” Over the past two years Jungles in Paris—its name partly inspired by Rousseau—has taken the Maine-raised siblings to Jamaica, Zambia and Tanzania, where they saw two of only six Black Rhinos left in the country.

The Dictionary is directed by New York filmmaker Meshakai Wolf and features the Macedonian Romani poet and songwriter Muzafer Bislim’s 35-year quest to create a hand written dictionary of the Gypsy language. “Without much in the way of standardized texts or written records, Romani faces an unsure future,” says Oliver of today’s film’s protagonist, also the subject of a forthcoming feature length documentary from Wolf. “There’s a term that gets used called salvage ethnography showing the way people lived, or the way something was as it’s on the cusp of disappearing. Some of what we’re doing is that.”

Rebecca Guinness is Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.