Consider yourself an environmentalist but lack sense of direction and umph? Well, that may be a lot of us as our region just endured four months of extremely high pollen and are well into wildfire season; take care to put fires OUT! July, says poet, Al Young, makes us lazy.
To boost your umph, I recommend supporting a fine almost finished film: A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet, produced by Mark Kitchell. Become its audience or send money; connect on Facebook.
“Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mark Kitchell (Berkeley in the Sixties) winningly spans the broad scope of environmental history in this comprehensive doc, connecting its origins with the variety of issues still challenging society today.” – Justin Lowe, The Hollywood Reporter
We saw the film and met Kitchell at Lydia’s Sunflower Cafe in the Redwood Business Center (across from OSH off Old Redwood Highway). Glad Lydia’s brought us A Fierce Green Fire because we need to know how and why to work together to fend off collapse known as climate crisis, among others. Increasing number of wild fires? Extraordinary horrible tornadoes? Dying cattle in Texas, dying coral and fish in the sea – PEOPLE all over the world without food or clean water? You won’t sleep well if you care and you do nothing.
See these: http://afiercegreenfire.com/ http://www.onearth.org/blog/sundance-diary-fierce-green-fire-premeire
Why bother? The film, not even quite ready for prime time, sold out 5 times at Sundance, will be narrated by Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and other notables, and the director, Mark Kitchell, produced another fine film Berkeley in the Sixties which speaks for him. Featured on PBS.
It’s not easy being green – every battle is against the odds, says Kitchell, Oscar nominated for Best Documentary, “Berkeley in the Sixties”, at Sundance, A Fierce Green Fire premiered at their Festival in January, 2012, and a wide release is planned for the fall.
(from Christian Kallen via Patch)
“There were five sold out screenings at Sundance,” said Kitchell when reached by phone this week. “Then we went to Washington for the Environmental Film Festival, and we got a standing ovation when it closed the festival. It’s been doing fabulously.”
A Fierce Green Fire explores how the issues of conservation, saving whales and stopping dams built into an international movement, from grassroots to global activism. It chronicles the growth of the environmentalism over five decades, including the Love Canal pollution scandals, the proposed dams in the Grand Canyon, Chico Mendes fighting the deforestation in the Amazon, the Greenpeace movement and other signature moments and movements in environmental activism.
But it also considers whether the issues themselves are too big for the environmental movement to deal with. “Do we have to have a hurricane take out Miami and Shanghai to have everybody wake up?” says Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider, in an interview recorded before his death in 2010. “If that happens in 2025, by then it’s going to be too late to prevent the melting of [Greenland’s ice cap]. If it happened next year it might be possible to still do that.
“What a hell of a way to run a planet.”
Kitchell pointed out that the film is not quite ready for general release. “There are three main tasks to do,” he said. “We have to finish licensing the archival footage and music, which can be quite expensive. We plan on having five narrators, from Robert Redford to Meryl Streep. And we’re working on an ending that’s a call to action for today’s activists.”
He and his post-production team plan to go into the editing room to complete these tasks after the Fourth of July, and are looking for a general release in September.
A Fierce Green Fire was presented by the Visionary Edge production company through Cinema Connect California. (end Christian Kallen)
OKAY – that’s the skinny. Want to help? Another chance is right in front of you. Go to the Facebook page or website and help Mark Kitchell help us all understand what we’ve done to our planet and how we can reverse course (with huge effort).