Playlist
<p>Grainy images of a storm-wracked New York during Hurricane Sandy play off a haunting voiceover by legendary filmmaker Chantal Akerman to conjure a meditation on life amid natural disaster.</p>
<p>Two photographers visit California’s Central Valley to cover the state’s historic drought, leaving with staggering black-and-white images of a bounty turned to desolation, along with the dire testimonies of the farmers hit the hardest.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The rock of Gibraltar is shared between two primate species: people and monkeys. The monkeys populated the upper rock long before the latest human inhabitants, the British, arrived, and now, 300 years on, there are tensions between the two. Attempts to expel the monkeys from the town with peashooters are in vain, as the animals rise to the challenges of the new game. This leads the government to resort to more drastic tactics.</p>
<p>Hamid Sardar’s breathtaking documentary Taïga provides an intimate glimpse into the world of Mongolian sheep herders, who must battle the twin predations of wolves and mining interests in the delicate ecosystem of the Mongolian steppe. Taïgawas the winner of a FIPA d’Or, the Jury Prize at the Festival d’Etonnant Voyageurs in Paris; the Grand Prize from the Union de Radio & Television International (URTI) for best documentary at the Monte Carlo Golden Nymph Awards; and an ‘Etoile’ de la SCAM as one of the thirty most influential films of 2014. A discussion with two Smithsonian experts on the arctic and conservation issues follows the screening.</p>
<p>With some of the world’s largest fracking operations on his territory, Caleb Behn, a young indigenous leader and lawyer in British Columbia, struggles to reconcile the teachings of his Dene tribe with the Canadian law intended to protect his ancestral land. His dynamic presence and his ability to straddle these two worlds set him apart as a torchbearer in a worldwide movement of resistance, but the pressures of leadership reveal deep fractures in Behn’s identity, and in the life of the communities he represents.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Jennifer Peedom was following the legendary Phurba Tashi Sherpa as he prepared for his record-breaking 22nd ascent of Mount Everest when the unthinkable happened: a deadly avalanche killed 16 Sherpas, and their community united in grief and anger to reclaim the mountain from the adventure industry that hires them to risk their lives. Through the voices of the guides themselves, their families, and the climbers poised to summit when the disaster struck, Sherpa chronicles a historic moment of tragedy and resistance in which the Sherpas and their families reconsider the spiritual, economic, and personal implications of climbing or not climbing Everest. Sherpa will air April 23 on Discovery Channel.</p>
<p>In his new film, Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox (GASLAND) continues in his deeply personal style, investigating climate change - the greatest threat our world has ever known. Traveling to 12 countries on 6 continents, the film acknowledges that it may be too late to stop some of the worst consequences and asks, what is it that climate change can't destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away?</p>
<p>People call Al Larson “The Bluebird Man” for good reason: at 92, this self-taught conservationist has dedicated 35 years of his life to saving North America’s bluebirds by maintaining a network of over 300 “nestboxes” in the highlands of Idaho that provide vital support to a recovering population. Bluebird Man aims to inspire our next generation of citizen scientists, reveling in the humble effort of Larson’s endeavor and the grandeur of the birds he’s fighting to save.</p>
<p>On the remote coastlines of Maine, Wales, and Newfoundland, scientists observe the annual life cycle of the Atlantic Puffin to discover what this intriguing little bird can teach us about the dangers facing our natural world, while environmentalists fight to protect vulnerable chicks. Join our team of experts and puffin lovers on Puffin Patrol.</p>
<p>The “bird rangers” of the Boschplaat Nature Reserve on the northern Dutch island of Terschelling, have always done much more than guard the wetlands. They’re full-fledged scientists, closely monitoring the island’s varied avian life: Rifs, Red Knots, Curlews, Godwits, and many other species. Oene de Jong, the National Forestry Service’s last professional bird ranger, takes us on a revelatory trip through the reserve that chronicles a rich history of conservation and speaks to the dire need for citizen science in the present day.</p>
<p>The dream of building an elevator into space – a ribbon connecting earth to an orbiting station – means many things to many people: the solution to the energy crisis; a slingshot into deep space; the democratization of recreational space travel. A scattered, often embattled collection of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs dedicate their lives to solving the hundreds of technical problems keeping that dream from becoming a reality. Sky Line catches these futurists at a key moment, when the discovery of “nanotube” materials reinvigorates their fanciful project.</p>
<p>Under the cover of legal loopholes and “wildlife sanctuary” fronts, breeding facilities in South Africa raise lions in captivity to be shot at close range by the highest bidder. In this big business of “canned hunting,” anyone with enough money can select an animal from an online photo gallery and then kill it while it sits fenced in. In Blood Lions, reporters and activists investigate these brutal practices that pass off animal cruelty as both hunting and conservation work, uncovering an international web of deception and misinformation.</p>
<p>From the producers of “Chattahoochee Unplugged” comes a new documentary about the forgotten Longleaf Pine forest that once blanketed the coastal plain of the Southeastern United States. Once comprising ninety million sprawling acres, by the 20th century, human pressures had reduced the forest to just three million. Just a tiny fraction of precious old growth remains. These remarkable patches of old growth Longleaf forest display more biodiversity than any other ecosystem in the Northern Hemisphere, rivaled only by the Amazon. “Secrets of the Longleaf Pine”takes you on an unprecedented journey to examine some of the unique plants and animals that can only be found in this remarkable place.</p>
<p>A documentary that looks at pundits-for-hire who present themselves as scientific authorities as they speak about topics like toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and climate change.</p> <p>Merchants of Doubt is a 2014 American documentary film directed by Robert Kenner and inspired by the 2010 book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. The film traces the use of public relations tactics that were originally developed by the tobacco industry to protect their business from research indicating health risks from smoking. The most prominent of these tactics is the cultivation of scientists and others who successfully cast doubt on scientific results. Using a professional magician, the film explores the analogy between these tactics and the methods used by magicians to distract their audiences from observing how illusions are performed. For the tobacco industry, the tactics successfully delayed government regulation until long after the establishment of scientific consensus about the health risks from smoking. As its second example, the film describes how manufacturers of flame retardants worked to protect their sales after toxic effects of the retardants were reported in the scientific literature. The central concern of the film is the ongoing use of these tactics to forestall governmental action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in response to the risks of global climate change.</p>
<p>As Turin emerges from an era of automobile industry, the owners of two bicycle repair shops benefit from the city’s newfound interest in cycling – and recycling. One repairman rose from homelessness to find love and success, and faces the day’s challenges with an acerbic (and often obscene) sense of humor; the other sees the “protocol” of his work as an extension of his study of philosophy, and takes on troubled youths as apprentices. Both evince the power of the bike as a tool of transformation: for the climate, for cities, and for the lives of individuals.</p>
<p>On his farm in the rainforest of Panama’s Bocas del Toro, an indigenous cacao farmer reveals hidden inequalities in chocolate production, challenging notions of ethical sourcing, sustainability, the meaning of “Fair Trade,” and the geopolitics of luxury.</p>
<p>After a near-death experience, an arborist realizes what he has to do combat climate change: migrate the California coast redwoods – some of nature’s most prolific recyclers of CO2 – northwards through a mass cloning initiative to survive threats to their environment.</p>
<p>Over a century ago, the Dutch fishing village of Urk was an island – until the Netherlands filled in their inland sea to make more arable land, and it found itself incorporated into a new expanded coastline. But the Urkers stubbornly resist change, refusing to give up fishing for farming, even when that means venturing further North for their catch. Episode of the Sea lets us into the otherwise inaccessible life of the fishermen as they vie with the pressures of industry, regulation, and public perception, showing the lasting impacts of human earth-moving.</p>
<p>Niels Stokholm is one of the most idealistic farmers in Denmark. He runs the biodynamic farm with his wife, Rita, and from their farm, Thorshøjgaard, they distribute products to some of the best restaurants in the world.But not everyone is equally fond of Thorshøjgaard and their holistic methods. Authorities and bureaucracy threaten to close down the farm. Phie Ambo follows their struggle to make sure that they are not the last to do agriculture the way they do, but some of the first.</p>
<p>11th September, the memory of a loved one, a dog called Lolabelle... What are the stories? How are they told to us? Heart of a Dog is a film about forgetting and remembering, about language and images, and finally about the way we tell others and ourselves stories. A line, an imaginary one of course, could easily link Heart of a Dog to Chris Marker and to the latest Godard. Laurie Anderson, renowned musician and multidisciplinary artist, takes us on an enchanting, lyrical and fun journey, spinning her weave of images and sounds with a bright poetic intelligence. The introspection becomes political, the family films in 8 mm become cartoons... And an entire imagination reveals itself, borne along by her voice and her music, inviting the audience’s eyes to cross the flowing, unpredictable and constant transformations of the images.</p>
<p>In Ordos, China, thousands of farmers are being relocated into a new city under a government plan to modernize the region. “The Land of Many Palaces” follows a government official whose job is to convince these farmers that their lives will be better off in the city, and a farmer in one of the last remaining villages in the region who is pressurized to move. The film explores a process that will take shape on an enormous scale across China, since the central government announced plans to relocate 250,000,000 farmers to cities across the nation, over the next 20 years.</p>
<p>On Earth Day 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, flooding the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil and devastating the coastline. Filmmaker Jon Bowermaster returns to the shores of Louisiana five years after the disaster, interviewing a rich cross-section of local denizens – fishermen, scientists, politicians, environmentalists, and oil-rig workers – to uncover the enduring impact of the catastrophe in a dogged investigation narrated by actress Melissa Leo. Has the Louisiana coastline been tainted forever? Will its economy and its ecosystem ever recover?</p>
<p>Between Montana and North Dakota lies the rugged terrain the native Lakota call “Mako shika” or “bad land,” a place of opportunity and hardship in equal measure. Now the oil development boom stemming from the exploitation of gas held deep in the Bakken shale transforms the region, bringing about an explosion of wealth for some which, set against a history of economic turmoil, looks increasingly unsustainable. Makoshika presents a vivid portrait of a diverse American community in a moment of profound change.</p>
<p>Upriver is an immersive exploration of one of the Nation’s most active river conservation movements. Within Oregon’s heavily populated Willamette River system, the film focuses on people from all walks of life who are coming together in forests, farmlands, and cities to revive the health of this large river and the life it supports. The film gives hope and how-tos to anyone working to protect our most precious resource… and is a poetic reminder that we all live Upriver.</p>
<p>When a Hispaniolan Emerald, one of the world’s smallest birds, builds its nest in a construction site, a rural community in the Dominican Republic faces tough decisions about conservation.</p>
<p>The Dominican Republic boasts a plenitude of natural resources, yet this abundance is rarely figured into projections of the country’s development. How can ordinary people – let alone big businesses – quantify “natural capital”? The Value of Life argues for an economics that figures in the ecosystems that allow us to survive.</p>
<p>Three radically different national parks within the Dominican Republic make up a UNESCO “Biosphere Reserve,” a cornucopia of biodiversity where countless endemic species inhabit a wide variety of ecosystems. The Reserva de la Biosfera series spotlights each of these parks in individual 15-minute episodes: Jaragua, one of the Carribean’s largest coastal protected areas, the iconic mountain landscape of the Sierra de Bahuroco, and the pristine salt lake of Enriquillo.</p>
<p>A look at seven communities around the world with the proposition that we can seize the crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.</p>
<p>All across America, citizens suffer the manifold consequences of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas, from the health threats of contamination to the false promise of prosperity. Dear President Obama, The Clean Energy Revolution Is Now presents their grievances as a united front, bolstered by testimonies from scientists, economists, geologists, and whistle-blowers, in an effort to convince our current president and those who follow to join the nation’s growing “anti-fracking” majority.</p>
<p>An unemployed American worker, a Tea Party activist, and a Chinese solar entrepreneur race to lead the clean energy future. Who wins and who loses in the battle for power in the 21st century?</p>
<p>In the Sri Lankan jungle, a newborn monkey and its mother struggle to survive within the competitive social hierarchy of the Temple Troop, a group of macaques living in a complex of ancient ruins. While navigating the Troop’s internal squabbles, they must also coexist with diverse neighbors, from elephants to mongooses to the most perplexing of all – human beings. Seamlessly melding timeless storytelling and comic narration by Tina Fey with real scientific observations of macaque behavior, Monkey Kingdom is a delight for animal-loving kids and adults alike.</p>
<p>The residents of Nelson County, Virginia – from the inhabitants of a land co-op to a family of distillers – unite to fight the extension of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline through their land. Their dissent raises key questions of eminent domain, individual rights, and environmental justice.</p>
<p>Led by Jane Goodall, world leaders in government, nonprofit, and business sectors convene at the World Economic Forum and form a chorus of voices to help put a stop to deforestation.</p>
<p>After finding fame tracking the retreat of glaciers, photographer James Balog travels to Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory to capture evidence of climate change in its most essential, yet elusive form: the air we breathe.</p>
<p>In 1957, Claude Lorius, a young student, joined the pioneers of polar science in Antarctica. This experience of extreme living revealed his calling : Claude would be a glaciologist. Convinced that the ices of the Antarctic contained crucial data to understand the climatic history of our world, he pursued his research for three decades. What he discovered exceeded his wildest expectations...</p> <p><a href="http://www.education.iceandsky.com/" target="_blank">www.education.iceandsky.com</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/WildTouch.org/">Wild-Touch Productions Facebook page</a></p>
<p>On a Venezuelan island sit the ruins of the first Spanish city in South America, abandoned with the depletion of its pearl beds. A government plan to create a tourist site there stalled, and archeologist Jorge Armand finds deeper meaning in this refusal to acknowledge the nation’s fraught history.</p>
<p>In the Te Urewara forests of northern New Zealand, the fiercely independent Tūhoe Maori tribe undertakes the building of a grand new meeting hall using radically sustainable methods. Their “Living Building” embodies the community’s deep and respectful relationship with their land and the persistence of their culture in the face of brutal colonization. Ever the Land engages with Tūhoe’s project at manifold levels – from labor squabbles to bedtime stories to the negotiations with the national government – showing the centrality of the environment to Maori tradition.</p>
<p>Many travelers think they know the Outer Banks, but south of Ocracoke Inlet rises a luminous bar of sand almost sixty miles in extent: the wild, remote beaches of Cape Lookout National Seashore, one of the few remaining natural barrier island systems in the world. At once exaltation and elegy, Ribbon of Sand profiles this seascape and the transitory islands doomed to disappear.</p>
<p>In northern New Mexico, a range of mountains rises up from the high desert: a wild, rugged land of the Faraway Nearby. The volcanic Jemez Mountains are isolated from all other ranges — an island in the sky, surrounded by a desert sea. Sky Island profiles this enchanting landscape and our place within it.</p>
<p>The recovery of the osprey population after population damage due to environmental contaminants is one of the great conservation successes of our time. Osprey: Marine Sentinel tells the story through a combination of dramatic footage of this iconic raptor and interviews with expert ornithologists.</p>
<p>An American Ascent documents the first African American expedition to tackle Denali, North America's highest peak and explores the complex relationship many African-Americans have with the outdoors. As the United States transitions to a 'minority majority' nation, a staggering number of people of color do not identify with America's wild places. By embarking on the grueling multi-week climb of the 20,327ft Denali, nine African-American climbers set out to bridge this 'adventure gap' - challenging outdated notions of what adventure looks like by changing the face of America's biggest and baddest mountain on the 100th anniversary of its first summit.</p>
<p>The life and work of photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has spent forty years documenting deprived societies in hidden corners of the world.</p>
<p>Documentary about the two big resources in the North Atlantic, fish and oil, and the impact of their exploitation on the environment in various countries on both sides of the Atlantic.</p>
<p>A real life science fiction movie exploring a world creeping right beneath our feet, where time and space are magnified and intelligence redefined. The Creeping Garden is a feature length creative documentary exploring the work of fringe scientists, mycologists and artists, and their relationship with the extraordinary plasmodial slime mold. This is a unique exploration into a hitherto untapped subject matter, observing and immersing the audience into the worlds of the observers and the observed.</p>
<p>A chipmunk in a forest and a grasshopper mouse in the Arizona desert face titanic battles when they find themselves alone for the first time. Thankfully, these little creatures have remarkable superpowers that allow them to defy odds and survive threats from all sides. Tiny Giants uses specialist 3D cameras to shrink audiences down to mouse-height, immersing them in a thrilling miniature world, guided by a narration by legendary British actor Stephen Fry.</p>
<p>Every animal shares one experience: taking its first steps into a vast and dangerous world after being born. In this episode of the BBC’s Life Story, the legendary David Attenborough shows us how a globe-spanning collection of creatures copes with the challenges of emerging for the first time. From the Barnacle goose chick’s death-defying leap to the airborne acrobatics of orchid mantises to the nocturnal explorations of the Long-eared jerboa – a species never before filmed in the wild – Life Story captures a wide variety of animals’ first tentative motions in delightful and innovative ways.</p>
<p>Twenty-two years ago, Disney thought they could impose an unwanted American History theme park on the people of central Virginia. They thought people wanted white-washed history with rollercoasters and battle reenactments. They thought people wouldn’t mind their plans for a massive development of apartments, hotels, and golf courses. They thought people wouldn’t notice the project’s impacts on traffic, sprawl. and the environment. They thought wrong.</p>
<p>In 1976, William W. Warner’s Pulitzer-winning Beautiful Swimmers delighted readers everywhere with its tales of Callinectes sapidus, or the Atlantic blue crab, and the Chesapeake watermen whose livelihoods depend on it. Now, writer Tom Horton picks up where his late friend left off, returning to the people and places featured in that book after forty years. Beautiful Swimmers Revisited finds that while much about the Bay and its culture remains the same, a great deal has changed – in the crabbing industry and in the science of conservation.</p>
<p>Double Happiness takes the Chinese copy of Hallstatt, a small idyllic town in Austria, as a starting point to explore China's fast urbanization. Chinese cities are built where histories and memories can be easily forgotten and thus rewritten. the film intersects the real and the fake through visual imaginary and commentary, interviews and songs.</p>
<p>Coinciding with the National Parks Centennial, National Parks Adventure celebrates America's natural wonders. Narrated by Robert Redford, it follows a trio of adventurers and revisits Roosevelt and Muir's camping trip when the Park System was born.</p>
<p>As the average age of North American farmers approaches 60 years old, a new generation in the Pacific Northwest explores a future in agriculture by volunteering on organic farms.</p>
<p>Cliff Miller of Mount Vernon Farm in the Virginia Piedmont is trying innovative management techniques to sustain his farm for future generations. Cliff’s story is that of many farmers seeking new ways to be economically and environmentally sustainable.</p>
<p>Organic farmers in Tysons Corner, Va. reflect on a half-century of sustainable and community-focused agriculture.</p>
<p>At 85 years old, organic raisin farmer and lifelong river advocate Walt Shubin is not slowing down. He has dedicated the last 65 years of his life to restoring California’s once-mighty San Joaquin River to the wild glory he remembers as a young boy. Driven by his passion for the river, and despite worn out knees and joints, he takes us on a journey to help us understand why this river is so important to all of us as well.</p>
<p>Collard greens are more than a simple side dish. Brought to the American South with the slave trade, they hold a vital place in African-American cultural history. Now, a new generation of farmers, historians, and educators works to share this heritage, promoting healthy communities.</p>
<p>Industrial agriculture takes a toll on both the health of our environment and the quality of our food. This film surveys problems with today’s agribusiness world, voicing new solutions offered by farmers, chefs, researchers, educators, and advocates.</p>
<p>A young woman tries to resolve her guilt about the death of her brother.</p>
<p>The filmmaker traces the loss of her ancestral language over three generations of her family, and her own desire to recover it.</p>
<p>Director Helen Haig-Brown wonders whether her inability to maintain relationships might be connected to the traumas her mother suffered – along with much of the Canadian First Nations population – in the residential school system. In My Legacy, she sets out to understand her mother’s experience, deepening and complicating their relationship, bearing witness to the hardships endured by the women in her family while celebrating their beauty and strength.</p>
<p>Pro-business loopholes allow the American chemical industry to export pesticides to other countries even after they’d been federally banned for their harmful effects. On top of damaging already-marginalized communities abroad, produce treated with these chemicals often returns to the US unchecked, threatening American lives. Grassroots activists all over the world are fighting back, and Evan Mascagni and Shannon Post’s Circle of Poison amplifies their voices, setting the record straight on an international menace to human health.</p>
<p>Antarctic krill may be tiny, but they’re massively important: a whole ecosystem depends on these little crustaceans, with whales, seals, and penguins all relying on them as a primary food source. They’re thought to have the highest collective biomass of any species on earth, but their population is in precipitous decline, pushing scientists to delve into icy waters in search of answers. Their research, dynamically relayed in License To Krill, says as much about the wonder and mystery of nature as it does about the alarmingly immediate effects of climate change.</p>
<p>Short film about “murmurations”: the mysterious flights of the Common Starling. It is still unknown how the thousands of birds are able to fly in such dense swarms without colliding. Every night the starlings gather at dusk to perform their stunning air show.</p> <p>Because of the relatively warm winter of 2014/2015, the starlings stayed in the Netherlands instead of migrating southwards. This gave filmmaker Jan van IJken the opportunity to film one of the most spectacular and amazing natural phenomena on earth.</p> <p> </p>
<p>At 85, Morag lives in the house where she was born, perched on a seaside cliff in the Outer Hebrides. She tends sheep and muses about what remains for her, revealing a mordant wit, a candid address of mortality, and a bone-deep connection to her rugged island home.</p>
<p>Children living on a former naval base re-imagine the threat of radioactive waste buried beneath their homes. In this collision of fantasy and realism, underlying environmental and class issues come to the fore in the psyches of Treasure Island's youngest residents</p>
<p>British Columbia’s iconic Jumbo Valley is at the center of a complex multi-decade fight: developer Oberto Oberti plans to build a massive resort in a section of the Purcell Range that’s both a sacred space for the local First Nations community and a critical environment for grizzly bears. Can activists overcome government interests and eager financiers to keep the valley wild? As a skier and adventure sports filmmaker, Nick Waggoner feels the lure of the resort, but understands that First Nations rights and ecosystem health should take precedence.</p>
<p>An 80-year-old elder of the maritime Bajau people tells the tale of his life spear-fishing in the depths of the sea from the porch of his stilted bamboo hut, while preparing for one last hunting trip. Younger family members and friends stand in for him in dazzlingly cinematic reenactments of his underwater exploits that fuse cutting-edge technology – 4K cinematography, drones, CGI – with age-old storytelling.</p>
<p>Oceans are a sonic symphony. Sound is essential to the survival and prosperity of marine life. But man—made ocean noise is threatening this fragile world.Sonic Sea is a powerful, visually stunning documentary about the impact of industrial and military ocean noise on whales and other marine life. It tells the story of a former US Navy officer who solved a tragic mystery and changed forever the way we understand our impact on the ocean. The film is narrated by Rachel McAdams and features Sting, in addition to the renowned ocean experts Dr. Sylvia Earle, Dr. Paul Spong, Dr. Christopher Clark and Jean—Michel Cousteau. Sonic Sea was produced by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Imaginary Forces in association with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and Diamond Docs.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1939, Ella Maillart takes her friend Annamarie on a daring trip through the Middle East, before traveling alone in British India for an entire year. Told through her photographs, 9mm films, documents, and various writings (as read by the actress Irène Jacob), Ella Maillart: Double Journey reveals the life and extraordinary odyssey of one of the 20th Century’s greatest travelers, an irrepressible voice who saw colonialism, gender norms, and global politics for what they were.</p>
<p>Kramatorsk may not be the nicest place a town of factories and broken infrastructure but its denizens find much to love there, reflecting on their home with frankness and warmth.</p>
<p>In Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, three generations of shepherds fight to sustain an ancient lifestyle in a rapidly changing world. Filmed over four years and encompassing the experiences of herdsmen aged 9, 39, and 82, The Living Fire preserves both the seasonal and lifelong cycles of traditional rural existence, registering its rhythms and celebrating its stark beauty. The intimate testimonies and everyday lives of the shepherds raise vital implications about what we’ve lost in our societal shift away from our natural environment.</p>
<p>Against the immense and unforgiving landscape of the High Plains, farmers and local politicians in places like Olton, Texas, fight to keep their towns alive against the decline of the life-giving Ogallala Aquifer. In these communities and others like them, the reality of groundwater decline is colliding with the legacy of independence and self-reliance that turned the High Plains into a fertile dreamscape. Written on Water is a moving elegy for an aquifer, equal parts visual poetry and harsh reality.</p>
<p>A gripping, award-winning documentary about an irradiated Ukrainian artist's search for the truth about Chernobyl and his prescient and powerful warnings about Putin's plans and a coming Russian invasion.</p>
<p>A group of soldiers in a small town on the Mekong River in northern Thailand are struck with a bizarre sleeping illness.</p>
<p>Inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a defiant community of women lives on some of the most toxic land on Earth. They share this beguiling yet lethal landscape with an assortment of visitors: scientists, soldiers, and even ‘stalkers,’ young thrill-seekers who sneak in to pursue post-apocalyptic fantasies. The story of the self-described “Babushkas” who chose to return after the disaster, defying the authorities and endangering their health, speaks volumes about the pull of home, the desire for free will, and the subjective nature of risk.</p>
<p>This documentary chronicles the life and scientific contributions of biologist E.O. Wilson, renowned for his expertise on ants and his development of sociobiology. It explores his Alabama upbringing, groundbreaking research on ant communication, and his controversial theories on human behavior and evolution. The film also highlights his conservation efforts in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, reflecting his enduring passion for the natural world.</p>
<p>A vast and largely unexplored wildlife corridor lies hidden on the western side of Florida, stretching from the Everglades to the Alabama border. Three friends set off to immerse themselves in this “Forgotten Coast,” vowing to traverse it only by routes navigable by the Florida black bear. Their thousand-mile journey by foot, bike, and paddle uncovers a lost American wilderness and stresses the vital importance of conserving it.</p>
<p>After a mine explosion kills her brother, a pro-coal activist joins forces with a tree-hugging grandmother to take down the most dangerous coal company in the United States.</p>
<p>"Stink!" opens with a foul smell and a pair of kids pajamas. And a single father trying to find out what that smell could possibly be. But instead of getting a straight answer, director Jon Whelan stumbles on an even bigger issue in America, which is that some products on our store shelves are not safe -- by design. Entertaining, enlightening, and at times almost absurd, "Stink!" takes you on a madcap journey from the retailer to the laboratory, through corporate boardrooms, down back alleys, and into the halls of Congress. Follow Whelan as he clashes with political and corporate operatives all trying to protect the darkest secrets of the chemical industry. You won't like what you smell.</p>
<p>In rural India, women are tasked with providing water to their families, which also means being held responsible for their physical health – but often access to water depends on forces beyond their control. Bottled water companies pump aquifers dry, leaving towns without groundwater, while “untouchables” are only allowed access to contaminated sources. Control of water means controlling people’s ability to live, so in Women and Water it becomes a dramatic conduit into the intersection of resource issues and social injustice in contemporary India.</p>
<p>Photographer Rosamond Purcell finds life and beauty in the most unlikely of places: in junkyards and libraries and the backrooms of natural history collections. Transformed by her camera, using only natural light, decaying objects become uncannily alive, bearing the marks of their atmospheric conditions while evoking fantasies of other, stranger life forms. An Art That Nature Makes delves into the engagement with the environment that forms the crux of her photography, incorporating interviews with her scientist collaborators and admirers like filmmaker Errol Morris.</p>
<p>The 144-year-old Yoshida Saké Brewery does things the old-fashioned way: dedicated artisans work in concert with natural forces — the temperature and humidity of the air, the chemistry of the water, the swirling koji mold that fuels fermentation — to uphold a millennia-old tradition. The craftsmen live a life of monastic focus, sleeping and eating together under the brewery’s roof, but also one of great beauty. Through rich cinematography and sensitive filmmaking, Erik Shirai immerses us in the sensory world of saké, and in the whimsy and warmth of the people who make it.</p>
<p>Could humans live on Mars? Would we want to? Emmy-nominated filmmaker, Ian Cheney, provides insight into our currently unsustainable relationship with our home planet by examining the sci-fi speculation of 'terraforming,' or making another planet Earth-like, by altering its atmosphere. He calls on a multifaceted brain trust to process this big idea including a desert camp of Mars hopefuls, a bevy of sci-fi writers, Hurricane Sandy survivors, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, and a who's who of astrobiologists and earth scientists. BLUESPACE makes a strong case for taking better care of our water-rich planet so that future generations won't have to resort to interplanetary colonization.</p>
<p>When a drought ravages his rural Ethiopian homeland, young Ephraim and his pet ewe struggle to adjust to a displaced life amongst distant relatives. What was once cherished becomes forbidden, as his uncle prohibits him from doing “women’s work,” forcing him to practice his passion for cooking in secret, aided by the family’s three generations of strong-willed women. When he’s told he has to sacrifice his ewe for the next religious holiday, Ephraim must do anything in his power to save his only friend and return home. Visually sumptuous, Lamb sensitively explores how environmental desolation disrupts the fabric of society.</p>
<p>In the suburban backwaters of the Everglades, bored housewife Cozy longs to shake the swampy monotony that permeates her life. But even a crime spree with local misanthrope Lee Ray, kicked off by an accidental shooting, can’t break her ennui. This brand new digital restoration of Kelly Reichardt’s rarely-seen debut is a vital artifact of nineties indie filmmaking, reincorporating previously lost footage. Watching River of Grass feels like listening to your favorite band’s early demo tapes, rough and ready and overflowing with personality.</p>
<p>The remote forests of Kalkalpen National Park in Austria, the largest area of wilderness in the European Alps, have been left untouched by humans for nearly a quarter of a century in order to return to their natural, primeval state. The landscape regenerates itself in dramatic cycles of growth and decay, and this bold hands-off method of conservation yields salient results: the lynx, absent from the area for 115 years, has returned.</p>
<p>La Amistad, on the mountainous border of Panama and Costa Rica, is the largest protected area in Central America; cooperatively balancing the conservation of its staggering biodiversity with the interests of its three underserved indigenous communities proves a delicate challenge.</p>
<p>How can we contain some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? Toxic remnants from the Cold War remain in millions of gallons of highly radioactive sludge, thousands of acres of radioactive land, tens of thousands of unused hot buildings, and some slowly spreading deltas of contaminated groundwater. Governments around the world, desperate to protect future generations, have begun imagining society 10,000 years from now in order to create warning monuments that will speak across time to mark waste repositories.</p>
<p>A young man from Tokyo, in need of a major change, moves to the Iya Valley, one of the last traditional rural communities in Japan. He quickly realizes that he’s underestimated the difficulty of living off the land, but two locals – an old man and his granddaughter – help him adjust. Just as he’s settling in to the rhythms of life in Iya, a massive development comes tunneling through the mountain, threatening to shatter the valley’s bucolic world. Sumptuously shot on 35mm, Tale of Iya combines elegiac filmmaking with an urgent call for conservation.</p>
<p>During the recession, City of Trees follows three trainees and the directors of a stimulus-funded green job training program designed to put unemployed people back to work by caring for parks in DC.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="color:black">Ice and The Sky tells the story of a man who encountered his destiny, aged 23, in the Antarctic. The film will retrace his life's journey, from his first steps as a young glaciologist to the crowning moment of his glittering career - winning the Blue Planet Prize, the Nobel of environmental sciences. This is the story of Claude Lorius, and his groundbreaking climatological research.</span></span></span></p>
<p>Three families live in a village partially submerged by water in Northwestern Mexico. Despite their loneliness and fear, they refuse to leave.</p>
<p>Inside the guarded perimeter of Svalka, a hellish junkyard on the outskirts of Moscow, a dogged yet vibrant community ekes out a life, dreaming of escape. Filmmaker Hanna Polak follows Yula, a child of the Svalka, through fourteen years of travails and small joys: we meet her at age ten, a bright anomaly in a desolate world, and watch her fight her way towards independent adulthood. Something Better To Come is at once an incisive account of environmental and social desolation in contemporary Russia and a timeless story of the persistence of the human spirit.</p>
<p>An international film team brings attention to the threats facing the iconic Monarch butterfly, explores the ecological, cultural, and economic importance of the species, and celebrates the power of ordinary people within the United States and Mexico to preserve the Monarch butterfly for future generations</p>
<p>Unsung heroes, such as Eastern Shore biologist and conservationist Drew Koslow, confront some of the Chesapeake Bay’s biggest ongoing challenges, from replenishing historically low oyster stocks, to stopping nutrient pollution from farms that limits the Bay’s recovery. Koslow is working to install bioreactors to keep nutrients from livestock manure out of the Chesapeake Bay</p>
<p>The Ganges river dolphin is an endangered river dolphin found in south central Asia. The battle to save it includes much more than environmental issues. Retaining young conservationists in this region is tough. We follow the struggles of three characters, each working to save this species, while also fighting just as hard to say in this field.</p>
<p>An interview with William K. Reilly about the reality of climate change. Reilly was Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H. W. Bush. He also served as president of World Wildlife Fund, and in 2010 was appointed by President Barack Obama to co-chair the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill to investigate the incident in the Gulf of Mexico.</p>
<p>Edgardo and Heidi Griffith are the scientists and husband-and-wife team who first realized how close Panama’s national animal might be to extinction. In the early 2000s a virulent, invasive fungus called chytrid began sweeping through Central America, wiping out endemic amphibians. Entire species were lost and the world barely noticed. As the fungus marched southward, its indiscriminate crosshairs fell upon a bright orange toad in the highlands of Panama. An emblem for the entire nation, the Panama golden frog (actually a toad) finally drew the attention of the global conservation community. But it was too late. By the time David Attenborough arrived in 2007, Edgardo could only find one remnant population. Luckily he had already started breeding golden frogs and dozens of other amphibians in captivity. A decade later the fight continues. A new threat—a fungus particularly deadly to salamanders—looms on the horizon, and Edgardo sets out to find the country’s largest and possibly rarest salamander. This film also features Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction.</p>
<p>Across the globe supplies of groundwater are rapidly vanishing. As aquifers decline and wells go dry, people are being forced to confront a growing crisis.</p>
<p>Small-scale gold mining, widespread throughout the developing world, is one of the biggest sources of mercury pollution. A film by photojournalist Larry Price and producer P.J. Tobia for PBS NewsHour, part of an Emmy-award winning series on gold mining.</p>
<p>China has 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. Water resources are more concentrated in the south & west. In recent decades of rapid development have stressed China’s water supplies.</p>
<p>Delving into the nearly-religious significance of water, this profound rumination on memory and loss bridges the gap between its mystical origins, Pinochet's coup d'état, and the secret of a mother-of-pearl button at the bottom of the sea.</p>
<p>In 1964, planner Robert Simon built a suburban utopia that combined the communal spaces of European cities with the natural expanses of the American countryside. That place is Reston. In its early days, it stood as a beacon of racial equality within a still-segregated Virginia. Although the community has undergone major changes in the past 50,years, much of Simon’s dream remains. Another Way of Living honors Simon’s legacy, following him in the final year of his life as he tries to reconcile Reston’s commercial success with its original principles.</p>
<p>To some, South LA may conjure images of vacant lots and liquor stores; gangs and drug dealers. Yet a burgeoning movement of urban gardeners guided by a charismatic leader is working to change that perception, as well as that reality for the many who live there. Their mantra: “plant some shit.” The result: a beautiful garden sprouts up through concrete, a colorful oasis in an American “food desert.” Can You Dig This follows four gardeners of different ages and situations over the course of a year, getting their hands dirty to change their own lives, their neighborhoods, and the way that America thinks about food, health, and the environment.</p>
<p>A most peculiar crime spree is spreading across the UK. A rash of egg thieves raiding the nests of rare birds has precipitated a police initiative named “Operation Easter,” which has succeeded in confiscating thousands of eggs found under beds and floorboards, and in secret rooms. The offenders are motivated not by money but by the beauty of the egg and the thrill of the chase, but their apparently harmless compulsion has disastrous effects on an entire ecosystem. With unprecedented access to the most notorious and inconspicuous perpetrators, Poached delves into the psychology of the egg collectors as they confront their destructive obsession.</p>
<p>From a hillside office in his native Henry County, Kentucky, Wendell Berry captures in writing the changing landscape and shifting values of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture. The Seer adapts Berry’s agrarian philosophy for the big screen, exploring the life of the land and the people who inhabit it through nuanced observations of farming practices, interviews with the community, and painstakingly composed shots of the surrounding landscape. The result is a moving dual portrait of two deeply connected characters: Berry’s literary voice and Henry County itself.</p>
<p>Singapore may be a primarily urban place, but it also contains one of the world’s great green spaces: the first and only tropical botanic garden to be given the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site. A World Icon uses cutting edge aerial cinematography to capture the Garden’s design and architecture from a bird’s eye view, then descends to ground level, capturing each leaf and petal of the garden’s profusion of biodiversity, telling the story of how a modest tropical garden became a truly iconic park.</p>
<p>Mark has settled down – with a wife and a real job and a kid on the way, he’s got more responsibilities and less time to mess around. When his old friend Kurt reemerges from his ragtag past with the offer of a weekend trip to the Bagby Hot Springs in the Cascade Mountains, he welcomes the respite. But an ineffable sadness grows between Mark and Kurt as they travel east, a painful awareness of how their paths have diverged. Old Joy, luminously directed by Kelly Reichardt, tells the story of a friendship and, eventually, the healing potential of the American landscape.</p>
<p>Chewing gum might seem like an innocuous treat, but the moment its chemicals get digested by our bodies, or flattened onto city sidewalks, or dissolved into our rivers, it becomes a menace to society. And with a worldwide consumption of trillions of sticks per year, that’s a big deal for our health and our planet. Andrew Nisker embarks on a whimsical year-long journey to uncover the history of our chewing gum addiction, the full extent of the problem, and what we can do to fix it, talking to gum-makers, activists, scientists, and everyday people around the world.</p>
<p>Experience remarkable stories from the unprecedented scientific mission to comprehensively study the environmental impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and find new ways to ease the devastation. Includes the never-before-documented drama of bottlenose dolphins struggling to survive, and the capture of one of the world’s largest predatory sharks. The follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning film Dispatches from the Gulf. Narrated by Matt Damon.</p>
<p>Has the Gulf of Mexico recovered from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? As the tenth anniversary of the disaster approaches, this question is regularly posed. An international team of scientists has spent nearly that long studying its environmental impact on humans, wildlife, and the ecosystem. They provide assessments of the current state of the Gulf, but lingering questions are challenging their ability to predict the long-term impacts.</p>
<p>The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is one of the toughest competitions in the world: over four times more people have summited Everest than have made the thousand-mile journey from Anchorage to Nome though some of the world’s harshest terrain. Lance Mackey is the race’s greatest underdog, a champion’s son who beat cancer and addiction to achieve the longest winning streak in Iditarod history. The Great Alone pulls viewers alongside Lance and his dogs through every mile of his journey and reveals the redemptive power of the natural world.</p>
<p>We’re in the midst of a crisis of genetic diversity: we’ve lost over 94% of our vegetable seed varieties, leaving our food supply dangerously vulnerable to blight and famine. Chemical seed corporations only worsen this tenuous situation, blocking the genetic differentiation that keeps our crops healthy by patenting them. Thankfully, an inspiring ensemble of farmers, scientists, and seed savers works tirelessly to combine ancient stewardship with emerging science. SEED tells their story – and the larger history of human agriculture – with equal parts whimsy and rage.</p>
<p>Two radical environmentalists and an ex-marine plan an act of ecoterrorism: they build a bomb to blow up a dam, hoping to block the urban development swiftly unfurling itself over the Oregon countryside. In the wake of the explosion, the three conspirators go back to their lives, intending to cease contact with each other, but guilt and paranoia overtakes them. Night Moves finds Kelly Reichardt working in a new mode – the knife-edge thriller – while retaining the bone-deep understanding of character that has made her a leading voice in independent cinema.</p>
<p>Off the south coast of Australia, foxes have taken over an island sanctuary home to the world’s smallest penguins, damaging their population. But an eccentric chicken farmer and his precocious granddaughter hatch a plan to save the the penguins: they’ll train his mischievous sheepdog to guard them. Based on a true story, Oddball finds a wealth kid-friendly hijinks in real-life conservation issues, teaching that anyone – nine-year-old girls, misbehaving dogs – can have a huge impact in saving endangered animals.</p>
<p>Director Charles Wilkinson's evocative documentary beautifully explores how the artist Robert Davidson brought Haida culture back to its people.</p>
<p>The National Parks Climate Change Response program finds creative solutions to maintain the D.C. area’s great outdoor spaces amid rapidly changing environmental conditions.</p>
<p>The story of the HMS Erebus, a 19th-century ship whose crew perished when it became icebound, from the perspective of the doomed sailors themselves, as well as the Parks Canada archaeologists investigating the wreck in the present day.</p>
<p>Gwen Moffat is Britain’s first female mountain guide, and at 91 she’s a wealth of wit and stories. Filmmaker Jen Randall and writer Claire Carter interview her, while attempting the extreme activities – barefoot climbing, scree running, and icy dips – that she once loved.</p>
<p>A conservation easement ensures that an untouched island in Lake Superior will remain undeveloped; a group of young people gathers there to live in synchrony with the ecosystem</p>
<p>Parks embody our ideals of democracy: they’re for all people to use as they wish. This film reflects on the vital role of D.C.’s parks in creating a sense of community and connecting people to nature.</p>
<p>Human-caused climate change is transforming Colorado’s fire environment, raising temperatures, drying the underbrush, and subjecting trees to a host of diseases, including in Rocky Mountain National Park. For firefighters, this means facing an unprecedented level of danger on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Grant Hadwin was an expert logger working in Canada’s Pacific Northwest, until his conscience spurred him to challenge the destruction of the world’s last great temperate rainforest in which he’d been complicit. His one-man crusade culminated in his now-infamous destruction of one of North America’s most sacred trees, a perverse and outrageous act of protest that was, in itself, a crime against nature. Hadwin’s Judgement brings us deep into the mythic Canadian landscape, and into the moral quagmire of an ecoterrorist who dares to harm the thing he longs to save.</p>
<p>At the Gir Forest Sanctuary in Gujarat, the last remaining population of Asiatic Lions – a species that once covered much of Europe and Asia but nearly went extinct – has rebounded dramatically. In fact, their population has grown to the point that the small Sanctuary can’t contain them, and they rove the surrounding countryside, preying on cattle in rural villages. India’s Wandering Lions combines winsome wildlife filmmaking with a nuanced exploration of what happens when a triumph of conservation unexpectedly creates conflict between humans and animals.</p>
<p>In the early nineties, Robert Oelman makes a radical move: he leaves his psychology career to pursue photography and moves from the United States to Colombia, purchasing a small farm in the hills. On his journeys through the rainforests of the Amazon Basin, he discovers a new and idiosyncratic passion: taking striking images of undiscovered insects. After more than twenty years of traveling, searching, and photographing, his quest culminates in a New York City gallery show. Along the way he learns just how vital these tiny life forms are to the continued existence for all animal species – including humankind.</p>
<p>New York circa 1970: an artistic Renaissance flourishes in the galleries and clubs of a chaotic metropolis. Yet a cadre of renegade artists — Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer — dream of building something more expansive than the city will allow. The monumental earthworks they create in the Southwestern desert challenge our definitions of “art” and cast our relationship with the Earth in a radical new light. This is the story of Land Art, of the conflicts and fantasies and legacies of 20th-century pyramid-builders gone wild in the desert.</p>
<p>In 1845, three families traverse the Oregon Trail on their way to fertile lands, led by Stephen Meek, a wilderness guide whose supposed expertise might be a tall tale. When they lose their way in barren Indian country, willful Emily Tetherow casts aside the role of servitude she’s been forced into as a wife on the trail to challenge Meek’s authority. By realizing that the Cayuse Indian the men take captive may be their only salvation, she averts tragedy. Meek’s Cutoff is an aesthetic triumph and a vital intervention into our gendered histories of the American West.</p>
<p>What will be the fate of Peru’s Amazon rainforest, as this critical region of priceless biodiversity is turned into a hellish wasteland? Ron Haviv and Donovan Webster, two war journalists led by Peruvian Enrique Ortiz, embark on a clandestine journey into the rainforest. They uncover the savage unraveling of a pristine jungle and bear witness to the apocalyptic destruction in the pursuit of illegally mined gold with global consequences. Flash forward four years to a massive intervention by the Peruvian government.</p>
<p>Wendy is traveling North with her dog Lucy towards Alaska, where a good paying job awaits her, when her car breaks down in a small town. Already barely making ends meet, she’s devastated by this setback; drifters at the edge of town threaten her and locals treat her with indifference. It’s bad enough that she’s stuck, and struggling to keep herself fed, but somehow the worst of it all is the worry that she won’t be able to take care of Lucy, her constant companion, the one being she feels responsible for.</p>
<p>In a remote Icelandic valley, two solitary brothers who haven’t spoken in 40 years tend prize-winning sheep descended from their family’s ancestral flock. When a devastating sheep disease takes hold in the region, they’re forced to come together in order to save their beloved livestock from a government-mandated wipeout that endangers the livelihood of the whole community. Marvelously acted and disarmingly poignant, Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams finds a wealth of wry comedy and bleak beauty in the brothers’ desperate fight to preserve their heritage.</p>
<p>When a little girl realizes that the frozen fish fingers her parents feed her were once living fish, she tries to send them back to the sea.</p>
<p>An elephant working as a street cleaner takes up bicycling, vividly animated by Olesya Shchukina using real paper cutouts</p>
<p>A devious little monkey tricks two big monkeys into letting him eat the biggest part of a banana.</p>
<p>A little hedgehog finds a magnificent apple in the woods, but other forest animals have their eye on it as well.</p>
<p>A woodpecker and a colony of leafcutter ants get on each others nerve until they’re faced with a common enemy: a lumberjack trying to cut down their tree.</p>
<p>Abstract patterns and morphing characters dance to the buoyant music of Shugo Tokamaru, building to a mind-bending peak of exuberance.</p>
<p>Two insects help a caterpillar get into her cocoon so she can turn into a butterfly – but the the forest is a dangerous place.</p>