Environmental Film Reviews
Please join us for our second annual Food Justice Film Festival featuring four powerful films that explore agriculture and climate change, the colonization of food, exploitation of farmworkers and children, and the importance of saving seeds and traditions.
The free festival takes place online Sept. 16–19 and features Truly Texas Mexican, The Ants & The Grasshopper, The Harvest/La Cosecha and SEED: The Untold Story. In addition to film screenings, we’re offering panel discussions with the filmmakers, farmers and activists.
Featured Films
Truly Texas Mexican: The Native American roots of Texas Mexican food serve up tacos, feminism and cultural resistance. Over time and during conquest, Texas Mexican food sustained Native American memory and identity. Cooking foods like nopalitos, deer, mesquite and tortillas, Indigenous women led the cultural resistance against colonization. Based on the award-winning book Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes.
The Ants & The Grasshopper: Anita Chitaya has a gift. She can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognize, and free themselves from, a logic that’s already destroying the Earth.
The Harvest/La Cosecha: Every year more than 400,000 American children are torn away from their friends, schools and homes to pick the food we all eat. The Harvest/La Cosecha is “the story of the children who feed America.” It profiles three children as they journey from the scorching heat of Texas’ onion fields to the winter snows of the Michigan apple orchards and back south to the humidity of Florida’s tomato fields to follow the harvest.
SEED: The Untold Story: Few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds, worshipped and treasured since the dawn of humankind. SEED: The Untold Story follows passionate seed keepers protecting our 12,000-year-old food legacy. In the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. As biotech chemical companies control the majority of our seeds, farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers fight a David-and-Goliath battle to defend the future of our food.
Watch trailers and learn more at our film festival website.
Questions? Contact our Senior Food Campaigner Jennifer Molidor at [email protected]
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020)
This new documentary serves as the “witness statement” of 94-year-old naturalist David Attenborough, who traces his career as a natural historian and outlines how the biodiversity of our planet has degenerated over his lifetime. The narrative starts in Pripyat, the ghost city home to the former Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, and traverses across various locations including the African Serengeti. He laments over a drastic decline in wildlife, caused by humans. Attenborough ultimately articulates hopes for the future and brings to the forefront solutions that may restore biodiversity. Looking at his career that spans five decades, this could easily go down as one of the best environmental films of all time. Read more
Ice on Fire
Twelve years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up with Leila Conners to blast an environmental wake-up call to the world with “The 11th Hour,” warning of the dire consequences of unchecked climate change. More than a decade later, the political leaders most able to do something continue to ignore the issue, but while the cataclysmic effects of global warming become ever clearer, scientists and significant swathes of the public are trying to make a difference. That’s the focus of “Ice on Fire,” a deeply conventional though attractive documentary designed to reinforce just how bad things are getting while offering hope by concentrating on realistic proposals that can reign in climate change and even reverse its effects. Premiering at Cannes in advance of its June 11 launch on HBO, the film will likely garner a decent viewership via the network’s streaming platforms. Read more
Kiss the Ground
The actor Woody Harrelson narrates the documentary “Kiss the Ground,” a frenetic but ultimately persuasive and optimistic plan to counter the climate crisis. Streaming on Netflix, the film makes a case for the healing power of soil, arguing that its capacity to sequester carbon could be the key to reversing the effects of climate change.
Directed by Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell, whose credits include other socially conscious documentaries such as “The Big Fix” and “Pump,” “Kiss the Ground” takes a wide-ranging approach. The film begins by examining how tilling and the use of pesticides have led to soil erosion, and then traces the damage done to our ecology, health and climate. The filmmakers find a solution in regenerative farming, an ethical practice designed to restore degraded lands and facilitate carbon drawdown.
Traveling around the world, the directors frequently employ juxtaposition to showcase the beauty of soil health. In North Dakota, a regenerative rancher stands at the boundary between his lush acreage and his neighbor’s denuded farmland; footage of the Loess Plateau in China before and after restorative methods reveals how dust bowls can become a Garden of Eden.
Pedagogic sequences about science and agriculture are punctuated by short profiles of celebrities involved in climate activism, including Jason Mraz, Patricia Arquette, and Ian Somerhalder. They lend a friendly face to the fight for climate solutions, and like Harrelson as our narrator, their intermittent presence serves to ground the documentary as it zips from topic to topic. Read more
The latest environmental films to add to your watch list
A scene from the documentary We the Power. Courtesy of Mountainfilm
We reviewed movies from this year’s Mountainfilm Festival to find out which ones are worth your time.
More people are getting vaccinated, summer is on the horizon, and the Mountainfilm Festival is back. After going virtual last year, the annual event is combining the best of both worlds in 2021. There will be a small, in-person festival in Telluride, Colorado, over Memorial Day weekend, as well as a weeklong virtual festival starting on May 31.
As a media sponsor for this year’s event, Grist reviewed seven documentaries and shorts of the more than 120 featured at the festival, available to stream for a fee. These pieces explore racism in outdoor adventure culture, chronicle the next generation’s fight for a livable planet, and lay out the story of how evangelicals came to politically oppose environmentalism. Some were deeply moving, others left something to be desired — read on for our take on which films are worth your time. Read more
Something worth fighting for
Two films tell contrasting stories about the struggle against nuclear power
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Note: Beyond Nuclear, Goethe-Institut, DC and Heinrich Böll Stiftung, DC are making The Beekeeper and 33 Days of Utopia available free to screen at home until April 6. On Tuesday, March 30, at 1pm Eastern US time, please join us, the filmmakers and protagonists for a live discussion about the films and the culture of resistance to nuclear power. Register here.
“And at that point,” says Katie Hayward, halfway through Will McGregor’s short film, The Beekeeper, “I went cold”.
Hayward, the beekeeper of the film’s title, had just seen a news report showing the expanded footprint of the proposed two-reactor Wylfa B nuclear power project on the island of Anglesey in North Wales. Hayward’s home, which her family had tenanted since 1532, was right in the plan’s crosshairs. It would be bulldozed, and the farmland paved over.
Hayward’s fight to save her bees, her home and her rescue animals escalated, while her physical and mental health plummeted. As the farms around her sold out to Horizon — the nuclear subsidiary of site owner, Hitachi — Hayward found herself almost alone, a one-woman David against a corporate Goliath. Read more at Beyond Nuclear