Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to theatres next Friday, January 27:
BEHEMOTH

Director:
Zhao Liang

Premiere:
Venice 2015

Select Festivals:
IDFA, New Directors/New Films, Dubai, True/False, DocAviv, Moscow, Sheffield, Melbourne, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Istanbul

About:
A poetic meditation on the environmental impact of China’s rapid economic development.

Taking a more experimental approach than his past work, the social issue documentarian exposes the ecological and human costs of industry through unsettling tableaux of destroyed landscapes set to Dante’s THE DIVINE COMEDY. Using visually impactful images of the stark borders between verdant fields and neighboring desolation, the filmmaker demonstrates the devastation wrought by dangerous coal mining practices. Occasionally, he inserts naked figures within these hellscapes, but these unnecessary stylistic flourishes carry far less weight than images of miners and their families suffering from their toxic work. While its attempt to merge nonfiction with video art is not always successful, the film’s imagery proves disturbingly memorable.

Coming to theatres next Friday, January 27:
THE AGE OF CONSEQUENCES

Director:
Jared P Scott

Premiere:
Hot Docs 2016

Select Festivals:
DOC NYC, Sheffield, Telluride Mountainfilm, Antenna Doc, Waimea Ocean Festival, Wild & Scenic

About:
Global unrest viewed through the lens of climate change.

I previously wrote about the film for DOC NYC, saying:
Taking an eye-opening approach to climate change, Scott’s film reframes concern for the environment into a question of international security. Viewed by the US military and security experts as a “threat multiplier” for instability, climate change is repositioned at the heart of current global unrest. Droughts and floods lead to food shortages, conflict over resources and mass displacement. Will the world succumb to these cascading disasters or take steps to prevent them?

Coming to PBS’s American Experience this coming Tuesday, January 24:
RACHEL CARSON

Director:
Michelle Ferrari

Premiere:
American Experience (January 2017)

About:
A portrait of the woman whose writing popularized the environmental movement.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist working for the US Fish and Wildlife Services when she began to combine her lifelong love of writing with an interest in making science accessible, penning articles for the likes of READER’S DIGEST. Eventually, she transitioned to becoming a full-time author, after her second book, THE SEA AROUND US, became a best-seller and National Book Award Winner. While this and the other books in her sea trilogy changed the way readers viewed the oceans and the life they sustained, Carson affected the most significant change in public perception with SILENT SPRING, her 1962 book exposing the hidden dangers of pesticides like DDT, which had been unquestioningly embraced by the US government since WWII as part of a shortsighted view of “better living through chemistry.” Ferrari hews close to the standard American Experience format in this illuminating if conventionally constructed profile, reviewing her subject’s accomplishments through narration as well as talking head commentary from Carson biographers. The film also relates Carson’s pseudo-lesbian relationship with Dorothy Freeman and her struggle with cancer which claimed the author’s life less than two years after her groundbreaking book’s publication, which remains a cornerstone of environmental awareness to this day.