44 Blue Productions & Kevin Costner Team for Docuseries

44 Blue Productions, a Red Arrow Studios company, and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner have partnered to develop Onward, a docuseries about Indigenous communities.

Each episode of Onward will center on a different community, showcasing the oldest tribes and how their people, land and cultures have endured through existential threats such as climate change, commercial development and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The concept of the series is based on Cale Glendening’s documentary short of the same name that chronicles his time embedded with Kazakh-Mongolia eagle hunters.

Smriti Mundhra (St. Louis Superman, Indian Matchmaking), who helms Meralta Films, will serve as showrunner and director. Executive producers are Costner, Glenn Kleczkowski and Mark Gillard for Monitor & Merrimack Pictures; Stephanie Noonan Drachkovitch for 44 Blue Productions; and Glendening.

“We hope Onward will be an intimate portrait of family and community life that celebrates the diversity of cultures—many of them at risk of extinction—across the world,” said Noonan Drachkovitch, co-founder and co-CEO of 44 Blue Productions.

“I’m excited by the opportunity to explore the themes of family, sustainability, culture and community through a global Indigenous lens,” said Mundhra. “Especially in partnership with storytellers who are most closely connected to those worlds.”

Glendening added, “Onward is not only a preservation project but also a celebration of culture. My goal is to create the largest visual anthology of Indigenous people in the world so that we can help keep these traditions alive.”

“As the world around us continues to shrink, it is our responsibility to not only celebrate Indigenous people around the globe but to help document and preserve their customs and ways of life,” Kleczkowski and Gillard said. “To do so in partnership with Kevin Costner and 44 Blue as well as the amazingly talented Smriti Mundhra and Cale Glendening is a dream come true.”