Current location:	Home
Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Freeway Noise
Entry tags:	environment, film, science, sundance, teaching

Filed under "The Environment is cool."
Yet another article I ran across while preparing Science Saturday.

CNet: Sundance Film Festival, starring...the environment
Posted by Michelle Meyers

Nevermind the Hollywood glitterati. Many of the films debuting at this year's Sundance Film Festival feature a more understated star known as Mother Earth, and she plays roles ranging from dramatic to mysterious to horrific.

With one film all about dirt, another about global overfishing, and another still about a family's attempt to live with no net impact on the earth, the environment is getting top billing this year at Robert Redford's indie film festival, which kicks off Thursday night in Park City, Utah, and runs through January 25.

Five out of the 32 documentaries competing at this year's festival--which saw record film submissions and strong advance ticket sales despite the U.S. recession--fall squarely in the category of environmental films. But that's just a small fraction of the number of such films submitted to compete at the festival and doesn't include two out-of-competition environmental documentaries making their world premieres.

"We turned down about 50 environmental docs this year, and some really good ones. We didn't get anywhere near that many in the previous two years combined," said David Courier, a programmer for the festival's U.S. and world documentary competition. "We've had a history of showing terrific environmental docs, but this is the year for it, for sure...It's absolutely a reflection of what's on people's minds."

One of the pressures I'm under is to spend more money. Seriously. Since I use environmental documentaries in my classes already (the past two years I've shown "An Inconvenient Truth" to my geology and environmental science classes and this year I plan to add "The End of Surburbia" to my environmental science curriculum, even though I mock one of the people interviewed as an alarmist crank who is gloating over his predictions so far coming true), I may as well take a look at these and see which are worthy of my students' time. Even if I don't use them in class, I can recommend them to my students who wish to view them for extra credit.