The Sundance Festival itself might not be very green, but the lineup of films it’s showing this year sure is, with environmental themes showing up in at least 8 of them. The festival opened last Thursday and runs until the 25th, and is the scene of the world premieres of such anticipated films as ‘No Impact Man’ and ‘Earth Days’. And, these 8 films are just the ones that were accepted – many more environmental documentaries were turned down.
From CNET:
“We turned down about 50 environmental docs this year, and some really good ones. We didn’t get anywhere near that many in the previous two years combined,” said David Courier, a programmer for the festival’s U.S. and world documentary competition. “We’ve had a history of showing terrific environmental docs, but this is the year for it, for sure…It’s absolutely a reflection of what’s on people’s minds.”
Check out the descriptions below, courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival website.
The Beekeepers
The Beekeepers is an experimental documentary film that explores Colony Collapse Disorder: due to the changing environment, bees all over the world are dying. With beekeeping threatened with extinction, Richard Robinson’s film charts the history of this ancient profession, searching for answers to its current plight while daring the documentary form to be as artful and mysterious as its subject.
Who is the greatest swimmer of all time? Michael Phelps? Mark Spitz? If gold medals are your barometer, then maybe, but I’d like to see either of them drink two bottles of wine a day and still swim the length of the Amazon river. This feat is attempted by Martin Strel, an endurance swimmer from Slovenia, who swims rivers—the Mississippi, the Danube, and the Yangtze to date—to highlight pollution in the world. In his fifties and rather overweight, his treacherous journey brings him face to face with many obstacles, including water predators, rapids, and toxic pollution.
Flipper was one of the most beloved television characters of all time. But ironically, the fascination with dolphins that he caused created a tragic epidemic that has threatened their existence and become a multibillion dollar industry. The largest supplier of dolphins in the world is located in the picturesque town of Taijii, Japan. But the town has a dark, horrifying secret that it doesn’t want the rest of the world to know. There are guards patrolling the cove, where the dolphin capturing takes place, who prevent any photography. The only way to stop the evil acts of this company and the town that protects it is to expose them….and that’s exactly what the brave group of activists in The Cove intend to do.
Crude
Can 30,000 plaintiffs from five Indigenous Ecuadoran tribes find justice from Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil producers? Who is responsible for the unconscionable dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadoran Amazon, poisoning the most biodiverse place on the planet? Filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s latest documentary picks up the thread of the infamous “”Amazon Chernobyl”" case, a 13-year-old battle between communities nearly destroyed by oil drilling and development and one of the biggest companies on earth.
Possessing both a cosmic perspective that reaches into the vastness of time and space, and the kind of warm, earnest energy that inspires small revolutions inside human hearts, Dirt! The Movie offers an important and timely look at the vital relationship between those of us on Earth and something that is easy to take for granted—the soil upon which we tread. Inspired by William Bryant Logan’s acclaimed book Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, directors Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow employ a colorful combination of animation, vignettes, and personal accounts from farmers, physicists, church leaders, children, wine critics, anthropologists, and activists to learn about dirt—where it comes from, how we regard (or disregard) it, how it sustains us, the way it has become endangered, and what we can do about it.
Director Robert Stone concocts an inspiring and hopeful work in Earth Days, a feature documentary that recounts the history of the modern environmental movement from its beginnings nearly four decades ago. Environmental activism really began with the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and precipitated an unexpected and galvanizing effect on the national psyche. Told through the eyes of nine very divergent witnesses, including a secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, who actually cared about the environment; a biologist, Paul Ehrlich; a congressman, Pete McCloskey; and an astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, Earth Days is a visually stunning, globe-spanning chronicle of watershed events and consciousness-changing realizations that prompted a new awareness: the post–World War II American dream of a future world created by scientific progress, new technology, and economic expansion was rapidly changing into a nightmare.
The End of the Line
Sound the global alarm. Scientists predict that if we continue fishing at the current rate, the planet will run out of seafood by 2048 with catastrophic consequences. Based on the book by Charles Clover, The End of the Line explores the devastating effect that overfishing is having on fish stocks and the health of our oceans.
No Impact Man
GLOBAL WARMING! The headlines scream it; the thermometer confirms it; but few of us do much to address it. Author Colin Beavan and his family are pictures of liberal complacency—sophisticated, takeout-addicted New Yorkers who refuse to let moral qualms interfere with good old-fashioned American consumerism. Then Colin turns things upside down. For his next book, he announces he’s becoming No Impact Man, testing whether making zero environmental impact adversely affects happiness. The hitch is he needs his wife, Michelle—an espresso-guzzling, Prada-worshipping Business Week writer—and their toddler to join the experiment.
Link [Sundance Film Festival]
