Kevin Costner Partners With 44 Blue Productions on Docuseries ‘Onward’

Kevin Costner (Yellowstone) has set a new project.

The Emmy and Academy Award-winner is teaming up with 44 Blue Productions, director and showrunner Smriti Mundhra, series creator Cale Glendening, and executive producers Glenn Kleczkowski and Mark Gillard of Monitor & Merrimack Pictures to develop a new, premium global anthology docuseries, Onward.

The series will showcase the traditions and rituals preserved through generations by Indigenous communities around the world. Each episode follows a different community and turns a lens on mankind’s oldest tribes and how their people, land, and cultures have endured through existential threats (including climate change, commercial development, and the coronavirus pandemic).

The docuseries’ concept is based on Glendening’s documentary short of the same name. It chronicles his time embedded with Kazakh-Mongolia eagle hunters in the remote Altai Mountains of Mongolia. “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,” Glendening shared in a statement.

Courtesy of 44 Blue Productions

“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,” Stephanie Noonan Drachkovitch, co-founder and co-CEO of 44 Blue Productions, said.

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

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Added Executive Producers Kleczkowski and Gillard, “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. 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.”