Directed by Rita Baghdadi, Jeremiah Hammerling • Documentary • 2019 • 70 minutes
Between 2011 and 2016, drilling for oil in America reached an unprecedented peak, setting off a modern day gold rush in one of the most rural communities in the country: Trenton, North Dakota. Kalie Rider and her older brother Jed are both striving to rebuild farming in their family, having suffered the foreclosure of their parents' farm during the traumatic 1980s farm crisis.
When their uncle Roger makes a decision to sell a piece of his land, it sets off a domino effect of industrialization in Trenton. Now, with the church being eyed for a diesel refinery, the community becomes riven by competing interests. While Jed faces the possibility of having to uproot his young family and move away, Kalie learns to organize and resist.
Through its lyrical core, the film challenges the notion of 'progress' as it questions the long term human consequences of short term approaches to land use, decisions that ultimately affect all Americans, rural and urban alike.
Directed by Francine Strickwerda and Laurel Spellman Smith • Documentary • 2014 • 78 minutes
OIL & WATER is the coming of age story of two boys as they each confront one of the world's worst toxic disasters, the prolonged contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon by Texaco and other oil compani...
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2014 • 57 minutes
From New Guinean rainforests to Canada's tar sands, PROFIT AND LOSS exposes industrial threats to native peoples' health, livelihood and cultural survival. In Papua New Guinea, a Chinese-government owned nickel mine has violently r...
Directed by Lisa Molomot • Documentary • 2014 • 36 minutes
No classroom for these kindergarteners. In Switzerland's Langnau am Albis, a suburb of Zurich, children 4 to 7 years of age go to kindergarten in the woods every day, no matter what the weather. This eye-opening film follows the forest k...
