August Film Series

The August 17 showing of “Source to the Sea” is being co-sponsored with the Center for Environmental Law and Policy.  CELP Executive Director, Rachael Paschal Osborn, will be with us for a discussion on current water/river issues inWashingtonState and important upcoming legislation.

You are invited to attend and as you are able to stay for conversation after the films.  The programs will be shown at The Commons (home of Indaba Coffee and The Book Parlor) at 1425 W. Broadway Avenue (2.5 blocks west of the County Courthouse), at 6:30 pm.  Excellent Indaba Coffee will be available (bring your mugs).

August 3     DIRT, The Movie

DIRT! The Movie takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility–from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.  The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, “dirt is very much alive.” Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. “Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.”

DIRT! the Movie brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.  The movie teaches us: “When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. From that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.” 

August 10     THE STORY OF STUFF    &

                            THE STORY OF BOTTLED WATER

In The Story of Stuff, using a quick-paced cartoon format, Annie Leonard, an international sustainability and environmental health expert, tells the history of an item, virtually any item–where its parts came from, the upstream life; where it goes when we are through with it, the downstream life; and what it really costs. Leonard develops the theme further with a specific item in The Story of Bottled Water—where the water comes from, where the used bottles go, what bottled water really costs, and how we were persuaded to buy it through an advertising technique called manufactured demand.  These “stories” expose the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

August 17     SOURCE TO SEA: THE COLUMBIA RIVERSWIM

On July 1, 2003 Christopher Swain became the first person to swim the entire 1,243 mile length of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. His swim brought stories about the river’s disrupted ecosystems and dislocated peoples to over twenty-thousand North American schoolchildren, and to a worldwide media audience of over one billion people.    A group of thirty-plus Northwest filmmakers, led by Andy Norris, followed Swain’s swim, and created a modern history of the Great River of the West. The result was a ninety minute film that one reviewer called, “a heart-wrenching tale of a man and a river.

 The film includes stunning pre-inundation footage of Celilo and Kettle Falls, as well as a broad spectrum of interviews with tribal members, agency representatives, fishers, authors, nonprofit leaders, and citizens who trace the natural history and present-day challenges of the Columbia River in their own words. One educator described it this way: “The interviews weren’t just riveting, they made this grown man cry.”