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 Environments & Ecologies
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The Shrimp
Directed by Keith Wilson • Documentary • 2010 • 15 minutes
The Shrimp follows the life cycle of a shrimp along the marshes of Savannah, Georgia. Lush, painterly images and a (un)canny audio soundtrack create a rich observational work about Southern culture, human folly and the interplay of natur...
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Biocentrics
Directed by Fernanda Heinz Figueiredo, Ataliba Benaim • Documentary • 2022 • 109 minutes
How would you reinvent some part of your world using nature as a model?
In BIOCENTRICS, this and other provocations are answered through the eyes and voice of biologist Janine Benyus. Traveling to different...
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The Marion Lake Story: Defeating the ...
Directed by Greta Schiller • Documentary • 2014 • 28 minutes
Shot over a seven year period, The Marion Lake Story tells the compelling story of how a community on the east end of Long Island, N.Y. came together to clear their lake of the highly invasive phragmite reed. They educated themselves, ...
