
24 May 2006

An Inconvenient Truth
A documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.
You can’t plant a tree without believing in the future.
Award-winning war photographer Rita Leistner goes back to her roots as a tree planter in the wilderness of British Columbia, offering an inside take on the grueling, sometimes fun and always life-changing experience of restoring Canada’s forests. Leistner, who has photographed some of the world’s most dangerous places, credits the challenge of tree-planting for her physical and mental endurance. In Forest for the Trees, her first feature film, she revisits her past to share the lessons she learned. The film introduces us to everyday life on the “cut-block” and the brave souls who fight through rough terrains and work endless hours to bring our forests to life. The rugged BC landscape comes to life magically in Leistner’s photography, while the quirky characters and nuggets of wisdom shared around the campfire tell a sincere story of community.
24 May 2006
A documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.
22 Oct 2020
An epic journey along Africa's Great Green Wall — an ambitious vision to grow a wall of trees stretching across the entire continent to fight against increasing drought, desertification and climate change.
27 Apr 1983
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
02 Feb 2000
Gangstresses, a documentary by Harry Davis, tells the story of violence, poverty, and survival in the streets from a female perspective. Over a two-year period, Davis interviews female hustlers, drug dealers, rappers, porn stars, prostitutes, mothers, and daughters. Among them are Champagne, a well-known African American porn star who has a small child; Mama Mayhem, a street hustler; Uneek, a rapper from the Bronx; and Vanessa Del Rio, a famous porn actress. Musicians Lil' Kim, Mary J. Blige, Ice T, and Tupac Shakur also share personal stories of survival. The documentary conducts follow-up research on the women's complicated lives, offering glimpses of both tragic reality and hopeful recovery.
24 Mar 2012
As the most dammed, dibbed, and diverted river in the world struggles to support thirty million people and the peace-keeping agreement known as the Colorado River Pact reaches its limits, WATERSHED introduces hope. Can we meet the needs of a growing population in the face of rising temperatures and lower rainfall in an already arid land? Can we find harmony amongst the competing interests of cities, agriculture, industry, recreation, wildlife, and indigenous communities with rights to the water? Sweeping through seven U.S. and two Mexican states, the Colorado River is a lifeline to expanding populations and booming urban centers that demand water for drinking, sanitation and energy generation. And with 70% of the rivers’ water supporting agriculture, the river already runs dry before it reaches its natural end at the Gulf of California. Unless action is taken, the river will continue its retreat – a potentially catastrophic scenario for the millions who depend on it.
06 Oct 2002
Japanese cyber youth cultures have developed through the imaginative and novel use of technology. Underlying social, cultural and economic trends are examined such as Japan's unique, isolated island culture, the post-economic boom recession and changing attitudes towards the role of the corporation in work and career attitudes.
30 Jan 2015
An oil boom has drawn thousands to America’s Northern Plains in search of work. Against the backdrop of a cruel North Dakota winter, the stories of three children and an immigrant mother intertwine among themes of innocence, home, and the American Dream.
14 Jun 2024
A young couple battle entrenched tradition and hostile forces to bet on nature for the future of their failing, four-hundred-year-old estate. Ripping down the fences, they set the land back to the wild and entrust its recovery to a motley mix of animals both tame and wild, beginning a grand experiment.
12 Nov 2010
Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.
09 Mar 2024
Are we becoming Plastic People? Our ground-breaking feature documentary investigates our addiction to plastic and the growing threat of microplastics on human health. Almost every bit of plastic ever made ends up ground down into "microplastics". These microscopic particles drift in the air, float in the water and sit in the soil. And now, leading scientists are finding them in our bodies: organs, blood, brain tissue and even the placentas of new mothers. What is the impact of these invisible invaders on our health? Ziya Tong, author and science journalist, makes it personal by visiting leading scientists and undergoing experiments in her home, on her food, and on her body.
01 Feb 2024
Observations of birds and other wildlife at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and a Forest in Ithaca, NY.
03 Nov 2013
Live and Let Live is a feature documentary examining our relationship with animals, the history of veganism and the ethical, environmental and health reasons that move people to go vegan.
23 Jan 1984
Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's PBS documentary tracks the rise and fall of subway graffiti in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
09 Sep 2009
The story of lawsuit by tens of thousands of Ecuadorans against Chevron over contamination of the Ecuadorean Amazon.
25 May 2016
In Fabrizio Terranova’s film, Donna Haraway – an original thinker and activist, one of the founders of cyberfeminism and the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, which proposed a number of innovative theories about the existence of scientific knowledge – calls for the abandonment of the idea of human exceptionalism and for a conception of the world as complex web of interconnections between people, animals and machines. Jellyfish can be seen flying around her home while she discusses the stories that are necessary for Earth’s preservation and reads her fantastic tale of the art of survival on a broken planet, and of fusion and care between the species.
24 Feb 2006
The Salton Sea: An inland ocean of massive fish kills, rotting resorts, and 120 degree nights located just minutes from urban Southern California. This film details the rise and fall of the Salton Sea, from its heyday as the "California Riviera" where boaters and Beach Boys mingled in paradise to its present state of decaying, forgotten ecological disaster.
12 Jan 2004
Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream. But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge...
20 Mar 2017
Five years ago Kisilu, a Kenyan farmer, started to use his camera to capture the life of his family, his village and the damages of climate change. When a violent storm throws him and a Norwegian filmmaker together we see him transform from a father, to a community leader and activist on the global stage.
01 Jan 1995
Discover the "character" of one of Missouri's oldest tie and lumber operations through this archival black-and-white film that documents one of the last railroad tie drives on the Black River made by the T.J. Moss Tie Company of St. Louis in the 1920s. Thanks to release of the film by the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation, the rare footage in "Stamp of Character" takes us through the entire process of making railroad ties, at a time when forests covered almost two-thirds of the state. The original silent motion picture was shown in movie theaters as an advertisement by the T.J. Moss Tie Company. Using digitally edited narration and realistic sound effects, this video makes the past live again.
12 Jun 2009
Examines the devastating effect that overfishing has had on the world's fish populations and argues that drastic action must be taken to reverse these trends. Examines the imminent extinction of bluefin tuna, brought on by increasing western demand for sushi; the impact on marine life resulting in huge overpopulation of jellyfish; and the profound implications of a future world with no fish that would bring certain mass starvation.