SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL GREEN FILMS
Wednesday, 02 June 2010 13:05
This year TEC is delighted to announce a new relationship with the Sydney Film Festival, which is part of our communications strategy moving forward. We urge our supporters and anyone interested in the great challenges facing the environment today, to attend the festival screenings of these six inspiring and highly entertaining films. Read on for our communication director, Ruth Hessey's reviews of Cane Toads: The Conquest, Waste Land, Colony, Gasland, The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island, and Turtle: The Incredible Journey.
Cane Toads: The Conquest: noone knows more about cane toads than Mark Lewis. His original 1988 documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History started a national craze for squashing the beastly creatures and even spawned a line in cane toad hide accessories (including wallets and filofaxes). The story at that point was of an introduced species which had proved so sexually profligate, and physically resilient that it would even hump the foot of someone trying to kill it (the most effective dispatch after a car tyre being the freezer). Lewis has a knack for affectionate black comedy and the film was a world wide hit. He followed up with the hilarious Animalicious (a review of unnatural relationships between humans and a variety of creatures, including a boa constrictor and a feral squirrel), and The Natural History of Chickens (which looks at how Americans relate to their favourite bird). Cane Toads: the Conquest sees Lewis’ comic genius for human eccentricity wedded to the latest in 3D technology. This is one environmental horror movie you won’t leave feeling glum or desperate.
Colony: if bees are the canary in the mine, then this cautionary tale about the collapse of the American Beekeeping industry is a must-see for anyone interested in addressing ecological collapse. Even God, represented here by the devout Seppi family, provides no answers as the beekeeping business started by their eldest son experiences a financial implosion which could be a prequel to widespread agricultural collapse. As the bees start to simply disappear across America, bee keepers meet to try to target someone or thing that is responsible for the mysterious ‘colony collapse disorder’: is it the use of pesticides, a deadly virus, or something even more sinister? Beautifully photographed, Colony highlights the interconnectedness of all things mirrored in the productive harmony of a healthy hive. The gentle yet insistent tone of the film leaves a chill even as it leavens its basically frightening message with the hope that if we humans work together, we can save the bees, and if we save them, perhaps we can save ourselves….
Gasland: already scheduled for an Australian release this feisty, charming film also won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film festival. Josh Fox plays the banjo and never expected to become an environmentalist, but when a gas company tries to buy the rights to drill for natural gas on his family’s rural retreat in upstate New York, he starts to ask questions which eventually propel him into a nationwide odyssey. Hydraulic fracturing, which is also scheduled to take place across a third of NSW farming land, is a destructive underground process which shatters water aquifers and contaminates water supplies. Yet the more Fox learns about the ill-effects the more he realizes that “fracking” is a multi-million dollar business, and because gas is currently seen as the better transition fuel compared to coal, almost no-one is trying to stop it. If you want a heads up on this debate, which is only in its early stages in Australia, Gasland is the best place you could start.
The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island: It was like something out of a bad thriller: in 1985 French secret service spies bombed the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, killing one crewman and creating an international scandal that has never been properly resolved. Thirty years later the survivors of the bombing talk about the impact the incident had on their lives, as environment activists, and as friends. The happy ending is the life of organic back-to-nature bliss six of the original team have made for themselves on Waiheke Island, but as they discuss the personal toll, and reflect on the current state of the environment movement, it’s clear that each individual’s personal recovery is bitter sweet.
Waste Land: the really creative potential of a recycling society is not getting through to most Australians, so this film about people who live on the world’s largest land fill, Jardim Gramacho, outside Rio de Janeiro, could transform your attitude to waste forever. This is recycling in action amongst some of the world’s poorest people. In Brazil the garbage pickers are called Catadores. Originally artist Vik Muniz was going to document the catadores with photographs and artworks made from scraps, but as he got to know them he realized that their stories were too complex, potent and brave to be reduced to stills. What these people do with the detritus of modern life is extraordinary and director Lucy walker employs fantastic time lapse imagery which is as inventive as the catadore themselves. Despite the stinky subject this is transcendent, inspirational filmmaking about the interplay between art and human relationships.
Turtle: the Incredible Journey: this lovely film is kid friendly and perfect for anyone who wants to refresh their cinema-going with some joyful news from nature about resilience and survival. The film follows a tiny loggerhead turtle from her birthplace in the carribean sand to the arctic via the Atlantic ocean and the coast of Africa. How something so fragile could survive this epic journey through a perilous sea littered with plastic bags, super tankers and oil slicks, let alone hungry penguins and sharks, is as extraordinary as the feat of filming it.
