Directed by Jeanne C. Finley • Documentary • 2025 • 70 minutes
Seeking an alternative to America’s consumer culture, hundreds of back-to-the-land families coalesced around Poet Laureate Gary Snyder and settled on California's San Juan Ridge in the late 1960s. Repeatedly threatened by corporate Goliaths intent on clear-cutting the Sierra forests, damming the Yuba River, and polluting the Ridge with open-pit gold mining, the community organized to defend their homesteads. Their success in overcoming these seemingly impossible obstacles has created national models of sustainability. Now, they are facing their greatest threat of all: climate-driven wildfires.
A RADICAL THREAD is set against the dramatic scars of 19th century hydraulic gold mining and told through the story of the the San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project, a 17-year collaborative project stitching an 83-foot tapestry that visualizes the Ridge’s story in twelve narrative embroidered panels.
Up Next in Bullfrog Films
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Far Out: life on & after the commune
Directed by Charles Light • Documentary • 2024 • 85 minutes
Far Out: Life On & After the Commune tells the story of two rural New England communal farms. The film traces fifty years in the lives of a group of New England writers, activists and artists. It conveys not only how these “hippies” tra...
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A Rising Tide
Directed by Cheryl Fabio • Documentary • 2023 • 93 minutes
Seen primarily through the eyes of women and children of color living through housing insecurity in California's Alameda County, A Rising Tide aims to identify how and why homelessness occurs.
The film juxtaposes the perspectives of var...
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War for the Woods
Directed by Sean Stiller, Geoff Morrison • Documentary • 2023 • 44 minutes
Thirty years after historic logging protests on Vancouver Island, the battle to protect old growth forests is still raging. War for the Woods follows a new generation’s campaign against logging that once again has capture...
