WHAT CAN I
DO? ENGAGE! CONNECT! ACT! LEAD!
Tuesday, February 12th 8:15 am – 2:30 pmChristopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center 1118 Fourth Street San Rafael
The 5th Annual Environmental Youth Forum is for High School
groups. It incorporates film screenings, talks, and Q & A’s with filmmakers
and representatives from leading local and national environmental
organizations. The EYF was created to address the growing need for an active
and engaging approach to teaching environmental awareness and activism to a
diverse youth population. The Environmental Youth Forum will give students a
window into many environmental issues of our time and they will leave with the
question, “What Can I Do?” answered many times over.
The Films and Speakers
Among Giants – In the midst of California’s
coastal redwood region, Green Diamond Resource Company continues to clear-cut
redwood forests, devastating habitats and leaving scars across the land.
Farmer, a direct action environmental activist in his late 20s, decides to
tree-sit in the McKay Tract — a 60-acre grove of ancient redwoods that is home
to spotted owls, deer, flying squirrels, and countless other life forms.
Bidder 70 – The story of Tim DeChristopher, a
young man who disrupted a controversial Bureau of Land Management Oil and Gas
leasing auction in 2008. He posed as a bidder (#70) and bid $1.7 million to win
22,000 acres of land he had no intention of paying for (or drilling on). He is
in jail today for his beliefs, being released the day before Earth Day 2013.
Bitter Seeds – Beautifully told and deeply
disturbing, Bitter Seeds explores the way farming is changing all over the
world. Following an US complaint to the World Trade Organization, India had to
open its doors to foreign seed companies. Within a few years multinational
corporations have taken over India’s seed market replacing the local
disease-resistant strains, with dire consequences for local farming and
increasing the suicide rate for farmers who have been forced into growing GM
crops. With director Micha Peled.
Micha Peled produced and directed videos for the U.S. peace
movement in the 1980’s. He made his first television documentary in 1992, while
working as the executive director of Media Alliance, a San Francisco media
watchdog group. When his mother sent him the manuscript of her life story he
was motivated to make his first professional film. Will My Mother Go Back to Berlin was a first-person family story,
produced for German television (WDR and BR). Winning awards on both sides of
the Atlantic, Peled left his job to become a full-time filmmaker and never
looked back. Bitter Seeds is the
final film in Micha X. Peled’s Globalization Trilogy, following Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town
and China Blue. The films won 18
international awards, aired on over 30 television channels and screened in more
than 100 film festivals. They also connected viewers to NGO action campaigns
and encouraged Western consumers to understand their impact on the rest of the
world.
Cane Toads: The
Conquest – Cane
Toads: The Conquest is a provocative account of Australia’s most notorious
environmental blunder. It’s an often comic always tongue-in-cheek documentary
horror film about the environmental devastation left in the wake of the giant
toads’ unstoppable march across Australia.
Chasing
Ice – The story of
one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable
evidence of our changing planet. With a band of young adventurers in tow,
award-winning photographer James Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse
cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multiyear record of the world’s
changing glaciers. With guest speaker
Mary K. Miller.
Mary K.
Miller a science writer, producer and director for the Exploratorium’s
partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. My
academic background is in marine biology and science communication and one of
my roles at the Exploratorium is to help introduce our audiences to research
scientists and the ways in which they investigate and understand the natural
world. In that capacity, I’ve been lucky to spend time with fascinating minds
in some of the most interesting places in the world: Antarctica, Greenland,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, aboard NOAA’s exploration ship, the Okeanos
Explorer, NASA’s AMES, Goddard and Johnson Space Flight Centers, and the
Exploratorium. We have a number of exciting projects with NOAA, spanning our
fluid planet with labs across the country that focus on ocean, climate, weather
and atmospheric research. You can follow along on our adventures through this
blog with lots of links to the Exploratorium and NOAA websites.
The Eyes Of Thailand – The inspirational and powerful
story of one woman’s quest to help two elephant land-mine survivors—Motala and
Baby Mosha—walk on their own four legs. Treating their wounds was only part of
the journey; building elephant-sized prostheses was another. Their injury was
caused by American cluster bombs left in Laos
from Vietnam-era carpet bombing. With director and
producer Windy Borman.
Windy Borman, the Founder and CEO of D.V.A. Productions, has
over a decade of professional experience in film, video, event planning,
theatre, and the non-profit sector. She is a multi-award-winning Director and
Producer, as well as an experienced Researcher, Screenwriter and Social Media
Marketing Strategist, with field and studio experience on large- and
small-scale productions in the United States, England, Ghana, Thailand and
Laos. Most recently she produced “The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia”, which
premiered at Sundance 2012 and on HBO in October 2012.
As an independent filmmaker, Windy has produced and directed
films, videos, PSAs, and documentaries. Other credits include developing the
grassroots screening campaign for “Little Town of Bethlehem” (2010), the social
media strategy for “The River Why” (2010), “TEST” (2012) and “Suspended Belief”
(in development), and writing for IndieWire: Women and Hollywood.
.
A Fierce Green Fire – This epic film is the first
big-picture exploration of the environmental movement – grassroots and global
activism spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change. With director Mark Kitchell.
Mark Kitchell is best known for Berkeley in the Sixties, which won the Audience Award at the 1990
Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and won other top
honors. The film has become a well-loved classic, one of the defining
documentaries about the protest movements that shook America during the 1960s.
In the twenty years since that film he has worked in non-fiction television,
made films for hire, taught at UC Santa Cruz, done freelance production and
developed A Fierce Green Fire. He
went to NYU film school, where he made The
Godfather Comes to Sixth St., a cinema verite look at his neighborhood
caught up in filming The Godfather II
– for which he received another (student) Academy Award nomination.
Gimme Green – A humorous look at the American
obsession with the residential lawn and the effects it has on our environment,
our wallets and our outlook on life.
Green
Streets: Turning Trash Into Cash in an American Inner City – This is a remarkable story about
27-year-old entrepreneur Tyrone Mullins and his peers as they turn trash into
cash in the distressed San Francisco housing projects where they live,
confronting barriers to employment and conservation in a distressed urban community.
With director Sophie
Constantinou,producer Sam Ball and documentary subject Tyrone Mullins.
Sophie Constantinou has earned international acclaim for
tackling difficult subjects with artistry and sensitivity. Her directing
credits include Divided Loyalties
(Golden Gate Award, 1998 SF International Film Festival), a personal
exploration of the conflict in Cyprus and Between
the Lines, a lyrical documentary about women who cut themselves. Her
cinematography credits include PBS’s award-winning Maquilapolis, about the movement to change labor practices in
US-Mexican border factories; HBO’s Unchained
Memories, which tells the stories of former slaves, using their testimony
from the WPA archives; PBS’ Presumed Guilty, a portrait of a Public Defender’s
office; and KQED’s Emmy-winning Home
Front, about evictions in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Tyrone Mullins is a founder of Green Streets, a community
owned and operated green business that manages recycling and composting,
educates our neighbors on how to reduce waste and provides integrated
janitorial services.
The New
Environmentalists –
Robert Redford narrates the stories of six environmental activists and Goldman
Prize winners who each seek to protect Earth’s natural resources, combat
pollution and fight for environmental justice.
Rebels With a Cause – Tells the story of a handful of
politically savvy Marin County activists, who awakened their neighbors, local
farmers, and officials to the threat of sprawl and overdevelopment. Their
efforts set new precedents for protecting open space and shaped the
environmental movement as we know it today. With special guest appearances from writer, producer, and director
Nancy Kelly and editor and producer Kenji Yamamoto.
For more than
twenty-five years, independent filmmakers Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto have
been making critically acclaimed documentary and narrative films, including: an
award-winning documentary trilogy about the transformative power of art: TRUST:
Second Acts in Young Lives, SMITTEN, and DOWNSIDE UP. They also made the
narrative feature THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD, starring Rosalind Chao and Chris
Cooper.
Terra Blight – Terra Blight is a 55-minute
documentary exploring America’s consumption of computers and the hazardous
waste we create in pursuit of the latest technology. Where does the waste
go? The answers are shocking. With guest
speaker Kathy Wall, e-hazard expert from Marin Sanitary Service.
Kathy Wall was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, where,
through her studies and extra-curricular activities, she engaged in efforts
dealing with human rights and the environment. Through personal and
professional commitments, she has traveled to multiple countries including
Mexico, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and the US. Kathy always remains
vigilant when it comes to problems revolving around poor waste disposal
handling and inadequate sanitation facilities. These shortcomings can rapidly
pose a significant health risk, oftentimes disproportionately affecting
lower-income population.
WATERSHED: Exploring a New Water Ethic for
the New West – WATERSHED tells the story of the threats to the once-mighty
Colorado River and offers solutions for the future of the American West. With producer James Redford. James
Redford writes, produces and directs for film and television. His latest
directorial project, Toxic Hot Seat,
is a documentary film that examines the possible health dangers of chemical
flame retardants currently used in upholstered furniture made in the USA. He is
also working again with Karen Pritzker on a new documentary that explores the
emerging link between childhood trauma and life-long health problems – and what
can be done about it. He produced the film Watershed
about the Colorado River and the acclaimed HBO documentary Mann V. Ford.
Additionally, James wrote and directed Quality Time, an award-winning short comedy starring Jason Patric.
He recently combined his passion for music and directing in Andain’s new music
video, Much Too Much.
No comments:
Post a Comment