SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes

Documentaries and the Environment: Filmmakers Strive to Unearth Truths
By Sarah Keenlyside

The polar ice cap is rapidly melting, rivers in China are running black with glues and dyes from factories, and a vital springs in Austin, Texas is being contaminated by suburban sprawl. These are just some of the environmental crises tackled by documentaries screening at the Sundance Film Festival this year.

For over a century, non-fiction filmmakers have strived to tell us truths about our world, but now their voices are more crucial than ever. “The world around us has never been more complicated and the institutions managing it have never been less forthcoming with hard facts, with truth,” said Robert Redford, President and Founder of the Sundance Institute, and environmental activist, who also established the Sundance Preserve, a non-profit organization committed to preserving and protecting the open spaces and wild lands of Utah’s North Fork Canyon, as well as inspiring action for the benefit of society.

Laura Dunn's The Unforseen

“The world around us has never been more complicated and the institutions managing it have never been less forthcoming with hard facts, with truth..."

— Festival Founder Robert Redford

“Documentaries provide an alternative context for the truth that doesn’t exist otherwise,” he said. “There’s an appetite, humanly, for that.” Which may account for the widespread popularity of An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered at the 2006 Festival, about former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s decades of research on global warming. According to boxofficemojo.com, the film earned over $40 million worldwide last year.

“An Inconvenient Truth was a watershed moment,” Festival programmer Caroline Libresco said. “I think it coincided with a kind of burgeoning consciousness, especially among Americans, that had to do with Hurricane Katrina. Everyone kind of knew that there was global climate change – I think they had that language available to them – but it was never articulated so clearly. And what that film did was provide a proof test that we are causing this, our carbon emissions are causing this.”

Filmmakers Judith Helfland and Daniel Gold spent four years exploring the global warming issue and why there has been so little response to the crisis for their film Everything’s Cool, screening in Independent Film Competition: Documentary. The feature reveals how over the past two decades, the media has served as the battleground for opposing views about global warming. On the one hand, researchers, activists, scientists, and more progressive politicians have insisted that global warming is a real issue that will affect us in our lifetime if we do not alter our behavior. On the other hand, the corporate sector, lobbyists, energy industry funded think tanks, and even the current administration have dismissed scientific theories as science fiction and attempted to divert the public’s attention away from the matter.

All this frustrates Helfland and Gold to no end. “Americans will say, by a great majority and have for many years, that global warming is a major concern,” said Gold, “but then when they’re asked to list it in terms of all the things that you would vote on it falls off the map. It’s not even there… There were polls not so long ago [about] environmental concerns. Where does global warming come? Off the map – at the bottom – because people are thinking specifically about clean air, clean water, toxic issues… I think it should be at the top of the map – which is not to say that it’s more important than jobs or healthcare or national security, but they’re all linked.”

Helfland believes that the public mindset might be changing, but she stops short of being optimistic. “In the last few months it seems like a lot of politicians – as they’re gearing up to decide who’s going to be running in 2008 – are saying that global warming is going to be the platform issue: that either you’re dealing with it or not,” she said. “They can say that right now – we don’t know how that’s going to play out – but that’s certainly different than what they were saying when we set off [to make the film].”

Filmmaker Laura Dunn is more skeptical. “We have so far to go before we’re in any way sustainable,’ she said. Her film, The Unforeseen chronicles the decades-long fight that began when ambitious real-estate developers went head to head with Austin environmentalists over the damaging effects of suburban sprawl around Barton Springs – a vital water source and treasured community swimming hole. The locals eventually lost the battle.

Dunn’s biggest fear is that people will not change until the deterioration of the environment impacts their lives directly, which will mean it is dangerously late. “I think for so many Americans, especially privileged Americans like myself, it’s a bit of an abstraction,” she said. “It’s not a life and death situation yet, it’s not at a crisis level. Maybe it’s just a human dilemma, we don’t really respond, it seems, until we’re at a crisis. Otherwise we’re pretty content to just keep going about doing the things we’re doing.”

Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal firmly believes the first step towards change is raising consciousness about our impact on the planet. For her film Manufactured Landscapes, screening in the World Cinema Competition: Documentary, she spent three weeks following environmental photographer Edward Burtysnky through China and Bangladesh. During their trip, they recorded some of the world’s worst environmental ground zeroes – endless coal fields with no signs of plant life, rivers blackened by waste from shoe factories, enormous heaps of plastic toys that probably only entertained a child for half an hour before being thrown away. The experience profoundly affected her and it is her hope that those who see the film will be affected too.

“I considered myself a fairly environmentally aware person before I went to China but being in some of those recycling yards and factories profoundly changed me,” she said. “I just can’t buy something without thinking about that whole cycle of where it’s going to end up when it gets tossed away, and that has changed my behavior.

“It’s a complicated issue, there’s no easy answer to it,” Baichwal continued. “It’s just a question of being aware. And I think if consumers put pressure on these Western companies by voting with their dollars – by saying, ‘I’m not going to buy that because it’s made in a factory that has no environmental regulations and pays somebody $2 a day’ – that’s what will change things. That’s what will make the big running shoe companies and every[body that manufactures] in China – that’s what will make them wake up. Then I think we’re on the road to change.”

Which makes documentary all the more important for raising awareness about these issues now as time runs out. “The more complicated or difficult the truths are in any society,’ said Redford, “I feel, the more important difference documentaries and other means of exploring those truths will make. I’m optimistic. I believe in the end, people will always rise up against lies or injustice and for truth and change. Culture, popular and otherwise, plays an important role in fueling it all.”

“But it still all starts with a good story, well told, and that’s where I believe Sundance has helped documentaries evolve significantly and why they are having more resonance in general.”