Green Screen Enviro Film Fest: globalization, grizzy maulings and....Al Gore?

As if the films themselves weren’t reason enough to attend this year’s Green Screen Environmental Film Festival, the event offers all kinds of nifty bonuses, including free screenings, “Aromaround” (sizzling pans of garlic in the theatre), and organic concessions. The festival kicks off on Wednesday, June 1 and runs through Sunday, June 5 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with free screenings on four out of the five festival days.

The festival film that stands out as a not-to-miss is Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare, a painful depiction of how globalization spurs unexpected and horrible evolutions. Described by San Francisco State University’s Cinema Department Chair Stephen Ujlaki as “the best documentary I’ve ever seen,” the film examines two ruthless species that annihilated almost all other fish life in Tanzania's Lake Victoria after their artificial introduction in the 1960s. Spanning several years of shooting, the film’s perfection derives from the director’s exhaustive travel to and from Victoria, where he would shoot, then return to the studio to edit, and then go back to Victoria to capture the exact footage he required next.

Werner Herzog’s latest film, Grizzly Man, presents the bizarre wilderness incident that ended “friend of the bears” Timothy Treadwell's life. Having presumed that he could live safely among the grizzly bears of the Alaskan wilderness, the outdoorsman and author, along with his partner, Amie Huguenard, were eventually killed and devoured by one of the very animals to whom he had devoted years of study. Like Darwin’s Nightmare, the film is a keen reminder about the risks of romanticizing nature.

Finally, Roberta Grossman’s Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action provides a comprehensive look at Columbus’ poisonous legacy among First Nations people. Ushering viewers from Alaska to Maine, Montana to New Mexico, Grossman illuminates the varied and ongoing environmental attacks on Native lands, which are threatened by toxic waste, strip mining, oil drilling, and nuclear contamination. Native children play near radioactive waste, rivers that tribes depend on for food are poisoned, and reservation residents choke on the effluvia of mines and smoke stacks spewing noxious fumes.

In addition to George and Judy Marcus, the generous SFSU alumni who funded Green Screen, the festival boasts a bunch of big-name backing, including The Sierra Club and yes, Al Gore. (For those of you who would like to thank him personally for 2000, he will introduce the Saturday screening of San Francisco-based filmmaker Taggart Siegel’s The Real Dirt on Farmer John, which documents the hardships of American family farming, as well as its success stories.)

For more information call (415) 338-1236 or visit:
www.greenscreenfilmfestival.org.