Last weekend Madison was host to Tales from Planet Earth, a local environmental film festival screening 50 films over three days. One film I saw was Our Daily Bread, a German film about the industrial food production and high-tech farming that managed to comment on the process without actually doing any talking. The image above, reminiscent of old movies and war films, is just one visual that’s stuck with me since.

Rather than my trying to muddle out a summary, here’s the filmmakers’ synopsis of the movie:

To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

When the synopsis says the film “looks without commenting,” that’s exactly true. There is no narration and almost no actual talking throughout the entire movie. And since it’s in German I couldn’t understand any speaking anyway, meaning all I could interact with in the movie were the images.

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Just a few minutes ago I received this rather nonchalant tweet from one of the movie’s Swedish creators, Fredrik Gertten: http://bit.ly/IoQ96 DOLE dismissing the BANANAS!* law suit it seems.

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“When we look at the parks and we look at the United States and we examine the whole idea of democracy, I think that the park experience is an exploration of the idea of freedom.”

-Shelton Johnson, Park Ranger

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When dermatologist June Irwin first stood up in 1985 to speak at a Hudson, Quebec, town council meeting about the potential link between synthetic lawn pesticide and herbicide use and human and animal illnesses, she was written off as a flake. Irwin persisted, though, attending “every single town meeting in Hudson for six consecutive years - each time reading aloud a different letter with new observations and facts.” Eventually, she got her message across, and Hudson (population 5000) became the first town in North America to ban the use of these chemicals.

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Catherine Gund, filmmaker and co-founder of the feminist Third Wave Foundation, chronicles Sadie and Safiyah’s journey as they talk to chefs, farmers and food activists, as well as their own friends, about all manner of food policy and health issues. The girls educate themselves and the audience as they start asking very intelligent and probing questions about their own school lunches, how their food is grown, how far it has traveled, how it is packaged and prepared, food access, farmers markets and what healthy, sustainable options exist where they live. Director Catherine Gund explains that helping to teach her daughter Sadie how to make healthy food choices and to feel a connection to her food was part of her motivation for making the film:

Kids need to know the full benefits of local food: more energy-efficient production, more prosperous farmers, healthier communities, longer lasting and better tasting fruits and veggies. Kids need to know that their food doesn’t only come from the supermarket or the factory, but from nearby farms, trees and the ground.

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Click here to find an upcoming screening of the film near you.

It was an amazing experience to hear kids talking about these issues. This movie can have a real impact on the way we think about what we’re eating.

—Alice Waters, chef, author and founder of the Edible Schoolyard

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.

During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.

Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.

The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.

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[UPDATE: Dolphin Slaughter in Taiji's 'Cove' Suspended]

A seemingly paranoid, ex-dolphin trainer slowly drives through a foreign land while being pursued by police and other locals may appear to be the start of a riveting spy thriller and in some cases that’s exactly what this film is but instead of drawing from the mind of Robert Ludlum, this situation comes from a real life deep dark cover up. Four years in the making, The Cove, surrounds the slaughter of thousands of dolphins in Taiji, Japan instantly thrusts viewers into a sort of Flipper espionage that not only rivets the audience but sends them on an emotional and educational rollercoaster.

The Cove refers to a sea inlet of the coast of Taiji where on the surface the town seems to embrace dolphins but in reality some of the local politicos as well as a handful of fisherman keep the dolphin slaughter a secret to not only most locals but the rest of Japan as well.

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Throughout this summer the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is hosting a series of free bike-related movie screenings downtown at 7th and Mission Streets, right across from the Good Hotel. Once a month the hotel’s barren parking lot is transformed into a festive and inviting public space, where hundreds of people gather for free entertainment, socializing, and to eat tasty locally made snacks.

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This creative agency explains that they do not “work to sell products, they create work that sells ideas that build a more just and sustainable world”; and they are driven by a belief that “the right stories told in revolutionary ways can transform society“.

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“You’ve got a small group of multinational corporations who control the entire food system, from seed to the supermarket.”

A new documentary film, “Food Inc.“, exposes a frightening portrait of how dysfunctional and destructive our food system has become, and how dishonest corporations repeatedly compromise safety for profit. The movie illustrates how our nation is almost totally divorced from seasonal food, biodiversity and local production. We have entrusted the safety of our food system to a small handful of huge greedy corporations that are destroying us and the planet with massive monoculture factory farms and poisonous chemicals. According to Michael Pollan, this movie is “The most important film about our food system in a generation”. This excellent documentary was made by Robert Kenner and co-produced by Eric Schlosser, of Fast Food Nation fame; it is scheduled to be released on June 12 of this year.

On Tuesday, the Sundance Channel quietly rolled out an effort to change that. Billed as “film, art, music, design and more as we see it - filtered through that space between the underground and the mainstream,” the new SUNfiltered blog provides an eclectic range of content… and, as with the company’s television programming, green is a part of the mix.

As a company with a sensitive finger on the cultural pulse, it’s no surprise that Sundance has made eco-consciousness a part of the new blog. Of course, you’d also expect them to hire a smart, savvy blogger with an eye for cutting-edge green developments to cover this beat, right?

You’d expect that. What you’ll get, however: me.

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Host Sean Daily talks subject with filmmaker Irena Salina, director of the documentary “FLOW: How Did a Handful of Corporations Steal Our Water?” about the global water crisis and her experience making the film.

Wired Magazine referred to the documentary as the “scariest movie at the Sundance Film Festival” after its screening there in 2008.

Click Play Below,or

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Next Wednesday night, March 25th, tune into HBO2’s premiere of the documentary They Killed Sister Dorothy at 8 pm if you want to begin to understand the violence and injustice that surrounds the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. If you aren’t going to be home, then set your Tivo.

I was fortunate enough to see Daniel Junge’s film last month at the City of the Angels Film Festival in Los Angeles. The documentary follows the aftermath of the murder of 73 year-old Sister Dorothy Stang, known as the Angel of the Amazon, a Catholic nun and rainforest activist shot in the back while trying to empower local communities to set up sustainable farms while fighting illegal logging and land grabs.

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I asked Josh my favorite biofuel question at the time: If Willie Nelson can figure out how to run a car on vegetable oil, why can’t Detroit? I’d like to think we bonded a little over that. He had me test drive a diesel Volkswagen and told me that he had written some books and was going around the country in the Veggie Van, lecturing on the benefits of biofuels. He also said he was working on a film. I didn’t think much of the film making bit. I live in L.A. Every one is working on a film about something. Still, Josh had a sincerity and contagious optimism about him that was distinctly antithetical to being just another L.A. film guy.

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Honda, one of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival’s official sponsors, parked their hydrogen fuel-cell powered FCX Clarity right in the middle of Main Street Park City. The car has been getting a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ by most passer-bys, which may explain why the attendants looked slightly uncomfortable when I asked how much the car costs and how many are actually on the road.

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Until now.

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[UPDATE: Dolphin Slaughter in Taiji's 'Cove' Suspended]!

The Cove exposes an atrocity of unimaginable brutality. The dolphin slaughter depicted here is committed yearly and without knowledge of the general Japanese public, even though they could be buying highly-toxic mercury-laden dolphin meat disguised as fish from their local supermarkets.

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Those new writers got us over our Spring fever slump, and took sustainablog in some very interesting new directions…

May 2008

• Keith Rockmael reviewed the film A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba.
• Our friends at Low Impact Living suggested five eco-smart ways to spend your tax rebate.
• GO editorial intern Oscar Cardenas explored the environmental impact of using echinacea to fight colds.
• Guest poster Max Gladwell argued that social media can change the world.

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]]> http://sustainablog.org/2008/12/24/the-twelve-days-of-sustainablog-biofuels-preachers-and-echinacea/feed/ http://sustainablog.org/2008/12/22/college-students-your-green-video-could-be-worth-5000/ http://sustainablog.org/2008/12/22/college-students-your-green-video-could-be-worth-5000/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:16:02 +0000 Jeff McIntire-Strasburg http://sustainablog.org/2008/12/22/college-students-your-green-video-could-be-worth-5000/ Got a story, a camera, and some time over the holiday break? Get shooting — the National Geographic Preserve Our Planet College Film and PSA contest is underway. Contest winners can look forward to cash prizes, and screenings of their video the National Geographic Explorers gathering in June 2009.

This year’s theme, “Together We Can Make a Difference,” should get those wheels turning — with so many college organizations, and colleges and universities themselves, taking steps towards sustainability, there are many great stories that need to get told.

Official rules are available at the contest site.  The catch — the deadline for submissions is coming up pretty quickly: December 31 (sorry… just found out about this last week).

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]]> http://sustainablog.org/2008/12/22/college-students-your-green-video-could-be-worth-5000/feed/ http://planetsave.com/blog/2008/09/12/mtv-taps-online-video-to-kill-greenwashing/ http://planetsave.com/blog/2008/09/12/mtv-taps-online-video-to-kill-greenwashing/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:19:58 +0000 Jerry James Stone http://planetsave.com/blog/2008/09/12/mtv-taps-online-video-to-kill-greenwashing/ What happens when corporations stop greenwashing…and start being real? MTV wants to find out. The NYC-based network just launched a global marketing push to tackle climate change with TV ads attacking those guilty of greenwashing. All of this is part of their youth-targeted climate change initiative called MTV Switch.

The launch includes not only TV ads, but also a series of five short films. With the short films, the network will expose greenwashing to half a billion MTV viewers from around the world. The short films urge corporations and young people to move towards a greener lifestyle.

One TV ad, created by ad agency 180 Amsterdam, features an animated character singing a “green song”.

“The MTV Green Song simply asks you to do your bit for the environment by switching off your lights, computers and TV sets,” said the 180 Amsterdam creative director, Sean Thompson.

The short film series will appear on Switch’s sister site Element. It will be pioneered by five young innovators seeking to fight the climate crisis with their videos.

“In Element, we’ve worked to confront both the skeptics who think that climate change is just too big to tackle — and those who hope that just changing their light bulbs is enough,” said Mark Harvey, Internews Europe’s Head of Development, who with Emily McDowell is the co-founder and co-producer of Element. He added, “Our five characters are from a new generation of climate activists who will connect with young people looking for those who embody lifestyle change, rather than preach about it.”

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Image source MTV Switch

While the film talks about the destruction of the rainforest - 20 square miles a day being lost to logging and ranching - the real power of the film lays in the unfettered access that Junge and his camera crew had to the court room and the lawyers for the defendants. From the arrogant defense lawyers to the earnest government agents, the documentary captures the colorful characters and tragic lack of justice in a world where rich and poor live and die with the rainforest. Sister Dorothy was murdered for a $50 payment and over a 10 square mile tract of land known as Lot 55. But as the very flippant defense lawyer, Americo Leal, says “it’s very hard to survive when you irritate people in that region.”

What the film doesn’t talk about is the connection between these loggers, ranchers and farmers and the west’s appetite for virgin paper products and cheap meat in the form of fast food, as Gavin Hudson wrote about at EcoWorldly last year. If we continue to consume products without fully understanding their genesis, then we are complicit in the problem. If you consume soy products, find out where the beans are sourced. If you consume fast food, find out where the cattle are raised and where their feed is grown. Stop buying virgin paper products.

Up until Dorothy’s murder, in Para, there had been more than 800 murders over land disputes in 30 years. Of those, only one person had ever gone to prison. So as the film follows the three ring circus that is the Brazilian legal system and as the state prosecutors try to go after the rancher that paid for the murder, we see first hand the complicity between the systemic failures on every level and the destruction of the Amazon for commercial purposes.

While the environment, namely the protection of the Amazon, is at the center of They Killed Sister Dorothy, it is really a film about social justice and a horribly broken legal system. It underscores the incredible obstacles to protecting the Amazon and addressing poverty in Brazil, but it also highlights the number of people that want to do the right things. “Dorothy lived her faith,” says Daniel Junge, “she was faith in action.” Dorothy’s legacy lives on in Esperanza and the Sisters of Notre Dame who took over her work after she was killed.

The film is illuminating in ways that have the power to create change. It was shown to the Brazilian Congress, at the Economic Social Forum and won an award in Brasilia. Dorothy’s brother Tom Stang said he hoped the film would “bear good fruit.” The fruit it bears will be up to those that watch it and feel inspired to take action because of it.

]]> http://planetsave.com/blog/2008/09/12/mtv-taps-online-video-to-kill-greenwashing/feed/ http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2008/07/07/king-corn-film-reveals-how-subsidized-corn-is-driving-the-fast-food-industry/ http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2008/07/07/king-corn-film-reveals-how-subsidized-corn-is-driving-the-fast-food-industry/#comments Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:13:29 +0000 GO Media Sponsor http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2008/07/07/king-corn-film-reveals-how-subsidized-corn-is-driving-the-fast-food-industry/

Editor’s Note: This post was provided by one of our paid sponsors, Earth Cinema Circle, the only DVD club dedicated to increasing social & environmental awareness through entertaining films. Written by Ariellie Ford.

Behind America’s 99-cent hamburgers and 72-ounce sodas is a key ingredient that silently fuels our fast-food nation — Corn. In KING CORN, we meet two college buddies, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who move from the east coast to the heartland to really learn where their food comes from.  They relocate to northern Iowa, home of their great-grandfathers, with a mission.  They will plant an acre of corn, follow their harvest into the world, and attempt to understand what all of us are really made of — Corn. This entertaining and informative film is now available from Earth Cinema Circle.  The following is from an interview with Curt Ellis, co-producer of the film.

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