Happy new Year!! It has been so long, what was I thinking? I have been blogging on the TED Fellows Posterous blog (http://tedfellows.posterous.com/) and have been traveling in Bali for the past 3 weeks. I am working on a collaborative ocean project with Jodi Lomask of Capacitor (www.capacitor.org) and we went to Pemuteran, Bali to begin R&D and production for a touring perfomance, art, sci, action production about ocean health, coral restoration, and of course, the creative process. We are planning to return and have a Biorock workshop/Capacitor LAB some time later this year where participants help us develop the production and all of us ask serious and fun questions about green energy, waste management, and global solutions for helping our oceans thrive. Dance and sculpture, diving and innovating in the beautiful land of Bali is the goal as we film and improvise our progress with kids and adults.
I just received this: http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_13662914#ixzz0bIbdz9Kd
arts and entertainment
Enviro film festival in Golden has beguiling, humorous sides
By Lisa Kennedy
Denver Post Film Critic
Posted: 10/30/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT
Over and over again, plastic water bottles make their determined way along conveyor belts. Consider it an industrial-design ballet. It's also blue-capped evidence of a multibillion dollar market.
Even the makers of "Tapped," an intelligent, critical documentary about the bottled-water industry, knew to send a photo. It's an oddly beguiling image.
Directed by Stephanie Soechtig and Jason Lindsey, the opening-night film of the fourth Colorado Environmental Film Festival (Thursday-Saturday in Golden) begins its journey in Maine. Global concern Nestle, the bottler of Poland Spring, Arrowhead and a number of other brands, has quietly purchased groundwater rights. The locals are beginning to simmer.
The common good and a community's interests often seem trumped by business concerns. When Raleigh, N.C., and Atlanta were in the midst of extreme droughts, citizens had to limit water use. Pepsi and Coca Cola kept pumping. (If the Denverites among you do a double-take during Durham city councilman Eugene A. Brown's interview, it's because he's Denver council member Charlie Brown's twin.)
Beside the basic question of who owns the rights to drinking water, "Tapped" addresses the impact of all that plastic on the environment. According to the International Bottled Water Association, Americans bought 29 billion bottles of water in 2007.
Sustainability is a theme throughout the festival, although not always in the ways audiences familiar with the burgeoning genre of enviro-docs might expect.
"That's something we're trying to avoid, becoming a heavy-handed, environmental doomsday festival," says event co-chair Joe Brown. "We want audiences to see interesting things, beautiful things. We're not a festival that's just going to lecture at you."
Aurelio Voltaire's short "X-Mess Detritus" is a macabre meditation on gift-giving that could make Tim Burton proud.
Robert McFalls' "Homegrown" is a portrait of Jules Dervaes and grown children Justin, Anais and Jordanne, who have created a homestead organic farm within vrooming distance of Interstate 210 in California. They are modern-day pioneers — stubborn, mildly eccentric, hardworking — micro-farming their little plot, not on a prairie, but near Pasadena's teeming freeway.
A woman chasing down the common backyard snail is not a feat of speed. But Greg Young's 12-minute "On the Trail With Miss Snail Pail" is intriguing just the same. "No, no, keep them alive," snail-abatement specialist and artist Colleen Flanigan — a.k.a. Miss Snail Pail — tells a potential client over the phone. "Because I'm going to eat them." The film has surreally lovely images of Flanigan's "micro-livestock."
Jeremy Seifert's "Dive!" sounds like an oceanographic adventure. It's not. (For that, see "Gimme a Hug," a Dutch treat about shark behavior.) Instead, "Dive" documents the director and his friends' Dumpster-diving food forages in Los Angeles. Among the markets tossing pounds of still-good food away: Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.
Chances are, Seifert and friends won't convert viewers to a life of plundering plastic bags stuffed with produce just past its sell-by dates. But "Dive!" provides plenty of food for thought about how much we waste.
One could say that the growing festival serves a similar purpose: to entertain, engage and nudge audiences toward awareness.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
happy 2010!
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