Killowatt Ours

Sunday, Mar 3, 12:30P /

Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore

, Forest Park -

Tickets

Jeff Barrie/55 min

Kilowatt Ours is a timely, solutions-oriented look at one of America’s most pressing environmental challenges.  Award-winning film Kilowatt Ours: A Plan to Re-Energize America is a timely, solutions-oriented look at one of America’s most pressing environmental challenges: energy.  Filmmaker Jeff Barrie offers hope as he turns the camera on himself and asks, “How can I make a difference?” In his journey Barrie explores the source of our electricity and the problems caused by energy production including mountain top removal, childhood asthma and global warming.

Along the way he encounters individuals, businesses, organizations, and communities who are leading the way, using energy conservation, efficiency and renewable, green power all while saving money and the environment.

This often amusing and always inspiring story shows, “You can easily make a difference and here’s how!”

Jeff and his wife Heather share a plan to eliminate their use of coal and nuclear power at home by employing energy conservation, energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.  Through the Barrie's learning experience, viewers discover how they can save hundreds of dollars annually on energy bills, and use a portion of the savings to purchase renewable energy.

Kilowatt Ours invites viewers to help build a net zero nation, by conserving energy to the greatest extent possible at home, then using clean renewable energy to provide the electricity used.

Programming note: will be shown with Stories of Trust - Montana.

The Clean Bin Project

Sunday, Mar 3, 3P/

The Brown Cow, Forest Park

 -

Tickets

76 Min/FAMILY

Is it possible to live completely waste free? In this multi-award winning, festival favourite, partners Jen and Grant go head to head in a competition to see who can swear off consumerism and produce the least garbage.  Their light-hearted competition is set against a darker examination of the problem waste.

 Even as Grant and Jen start to garner interest in their project, they struggle to find meaning in their minuscule influence on the large-scale environmental impacts of our “throw-away society”. Described as An Inconvenient Truth meets Super Size Me, The Clean Bin Project features laugh out loud moments, stop motion animations, and unforgettable imagery. Captivating interviews with renowned artist, Chris Jordan and TED Lecturer Captain Charles Moore, make this film a fun and inspiring call to individual action that speaks to crowds of all ages.

Black Gold

Saturday, Mar 2, 7P/First United Church, Oak Park - Tickets 

Thursday, Feb 21, 7P/Whole Foods, River Forest preview night (clip)- RSVP call 708.366.1045;

Marc Francis; Nick Francis/2006/78 min

Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.  But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. 

Black Gold follows the story of Tadesse Meskela, one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.

Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the enormous power of the multinational players that dominate the world’s coffee trade becomes apparent.  New York commodity traders, the international coffee exchanges, and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation reveal the many challenges Tadesse faces in his quest for a long term solution for his farmers.

AWARDS: Winner: Best Achievement in Production, British Independent Film Awards. Winner: Best Documentary, San Francisco Black Film Festival.  Nominee: Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival.

Programming note: will be screened with Fair Trade Africa and For the Price of a Cup of Coffee.

Call of Life

Sunday, Mar 3, 6P/Unity Temple - Tickets 

60 min/Mature

All over the world species are becoming extinct at an astonishing rate, from 1000 to 10,000 times faster than normal. The loss of biodiversity has become so severe that scientists are calling it a mass extinction event. Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction is the first feature documentary to investigate the growing threat to Earth’s life support systems from this unprecedented loss of biodiversity.

Through interviews with leading scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and indigenous and religious leaders, the film explores the causes, the scope, and the potential effects of the mass extinction, but also looks beyond the immediate causes of the crisis to consider how our cultural and economic systems, along with deep-seated psychological and behavioral patterns, have allowed this situation to develop, continue to reinforce it, and even determine our response to it.

Call of Life tells the story of a crisis not only in nature, but also in human nature, a crisis more threatening than anything human beings have ever faced before.

Surviving Progress

Sunday, Mar 3, 12:30P/Ascension Church School (601 Van Buren), Oak Park - Tickets

Martin Scorsese; Mathieu Roy; Harold Crooks/2011/86 min/Mature

“Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.”  Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement as awe-inspiring and double-edged. It reveals the grave risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. With rich imagery and immersive soundtrack, filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks launch us on journey to contemplate our evolution from cave-dwellers to space explorers.  Executive Producer, Martin Scorsese.

Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired this film, reveals how civilizations are repeatedly destroyed by “progress traps” — alluring technologies serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. With intersecting stories from a Chinese car-driving club, a Wall Street insider who exposes an out-of-control, environmentally rapacious financial elite, and eco-cops defending a scorched Amazon, the film lays stark evidence before us. In the past, we could use up a region’s resources and move on. But if today’s global civilization collapses from over-consumption, that’s it. We have no back-up planet.

Surviving Progress brings us thinkers who have probed our primate past, our brains, and our societies. Some amplify Wright’s urgent warning, while others have faith that the very progress which has put us in jeopardy is also the key to our salvation. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking looks to homes on other planets. Biologist Craig Venter, whose team decoded the human genome, designs synthetic organisms he hopes will create artificial food and fuel for all.

Distinguished Professor of Environment Vaclav Smil counters that five billion “have-nots” aspire to our affluent lifestyle and, without limits on the energy and resource-consumption of the “haves”, we face certain catastrophe. Others — including primatologist Jane Goodall, author Margaret Atwood, and activists from the Congo, Canada, and USA — place their hope in our ingenuity and moral evolution.

Surviving Progress leaves us with a challenge: To prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.

Programming note:  will be screened with The Good Life.

Ingredients: The Local Food Movement Takes Root

Sunday, Mar 3, 12P/

Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church,

Oak Park  -

Tickets

Robert Bates/2009/67 min/Family (Free Child Care Provided)

American food is in a state of crisis, but a movement to put good food back on the table is emerging.  What began 30 years ago with chefs demanding better flavor, has inspired consumers to seek relationships with nearby farmers. This is local food.

At the focal point of this movement, and of this film, are the farmers and chefs who are creating a truly sustainable food system. Their collaborative work has resulted in great tasting food and an explosion of consumer awareness about the benefits of eating local. Attention being paid to the local food movement comes at a time when the failings of our current industrialized food system are becoming all too clear. For the first time in history, our children’s generation is expected to have a shorter lifespan than our own. The quality, taste and nutritional value of the food we eat has dropped sharply over the last fifty years. Shipped from ever-greater distances, we have literally lost sight of where our food comes from and in the process we've lost a vital connection to our local community and to our health.

A feature-length documentary, Ingredients illustrates how people around the country are working to revitalize that connection. Narrated by Bebe Neuwirth, the film takes us across the U.S. from the diversified farms of the Hudson River and Willamette Valleys to the urban food deserts of Harlem and to the kitchens of celebrated chefs Alice Waters, Peter Hoffman and Greg Higgins. Ingredients is a journey that reveals the people behind the movement to bring good food back to the table and health back to our communities.

Programming note:  will be shown with a clip from Food Patriots.

Film and programming sponsored by The Sugar Beet Cooperative.  A free soup and bread luncheon will be provided as well as free childcare that includes lunch and a film for children - reserve child care: junemoon15@gmail.com.

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Chasing Ice

Saturday, Mar 2, 10:30A/Lake Theatre, Oak Park - Tickets; 

Monday, Feb 11, 7P/Dominican University, Priory Auditorium, River Forest - FREE (limited seating-arrive early)

Jeff Orlowski/2012/74 min/Rated:  PG-13

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.

Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.

As the debate polarizes America and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Balog finds himself at the end of his tether. Battling untested technology in subzero conditions, he comes face to face with his own mortality. It takes years for Balog to see the fruits of his labor. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. Chasing Ice depicts a photographer trying to deliver evidence and hope to our carbon-powered planet.

AWARDS:  Chasing Ice has won 23 awards at film festivals around the world, including: SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL – Excellence in Cinematography Award: US Documentary; The Environmental Media Association’s 22nd Annual BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD

A Simple Question: The Story of STRAW

Sunday, Mar 3, 12:30P/River Forest Village Hall - Tickets

David Donnenfield; Kevin White/2010/36 min/Family

A Simple Question looks at a remarkable program that brings together school children and their teachers with community groups and agencies to undertake habitat restoration on privately-owned ranch land. It all started more than 16 years ago when Laurette Rogers, a fourth grade teacher, showed a film on endangered species to her class. Stricken by the weight of species extinction, one student plaintively asked what he and his class mates could do to save endangered species. That simple question, innocent yet profound, ignited something in Laurette that launched her and her class on an inspired voyage of discovery and transformation.

Two of the kids from the original “Shrimp Club,” John Elliott and Lucia Comnes, return to Paul’s ranch, marveling at theirs and their classmates’ handiwork. They’re amazed at how their efforts have so dramatically transformed the barren landscape. And, as we listen to them, it’s clear how the experience sixteen years ago transformed them — into articulate, passionate, capable citizens committed to making the world a better place.

Nomination, Northern California Emmy Awards; Spirit of Activism Award, Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival; Best Educational Documentary, Mammoth Mountain Film Festival; Best Educational Value in the Classroom, andConservation Hero of the Festival, Laurette Rogers, International Wildlife Film Festival;

Best Short Film, Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival, New Zealand

Programming note: will be screened with Stories of TRUST Arizona.