by Jennifer Prediger
HomegrownSpring and the Environmental Film Festival both
burst into full bloom at the festival’s start in the Nation’s Capital last
weekend. Eco-movie buffs, many having
withstood record snowfalls in Washington, D.C., this winter, eschewed the
beauty of the outdoors to watch the beauty of the outdoors indoors in the form of a wellspring
of eco-conscious cinema.
And there was a lot to see. In its 18th year, the
festival, which ends Sunday, is in the midst of screening an ambitious 155
films over 12 days at some 56 venues around town. Not in freezing, old theaters in some overrun
city in Utah, the Environmental Film Festival takes advantage of the great
wealth of resources in the District of Columbia, including prime screening venues
like The National Gallery of Art, American History Museum, seven different
embassies, Georgetown University, and the National Museum of Natural History
among many others.
Among the feast of food-themed films is a charming one called
Homegrown.
It’s about a pioneering Pasadena, Calif., family who transformed
their single-family home on a third of an acre into a micro farm. With eight
chickens, two goats, four ducks, and producing around 6,000 pounds of food, the
Dervaes family serves as a beacon of brilliance and can-do-it-iveness.
In addition to growing their own sustenance, the Dervaes
family sells local, organic produce to Pasadena restaurants. They also run a website, where their journey to
self-sufficiency is inspiring and also accessible.
This film shows the triumph and satisfaction of growing your
own food, along with underscoring the community created by such audacious acts
of turning your lawn into a farm. What
begins as an oddity in the neighborhood becomes a community treasure, bringing
people together.
After the film, the impulse to get your hands dirty is great—one
felt even greater after attending a screening of a documentary film called Dirt!
The Movie.
For such a strong word, something so, well, dirty, you wouldn’t expect homage of
this order to exist. Never has a film created in a viewer such a visceral need
to thrust one’s hand into the soil. This
ode to dirt begins with the Big Bang. From that beginning, it takes us to
another beginning narrative: God makes humankind from soil; he names the first
person the Hebrew word for dirt, Adam. Eve is life.
Dirt links us to where we come from—stardust. And this film
is full of stars. Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis and featuring interviews with
luminaries like Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, Alice Waters, Majora Carter,
and others, dirt remains the true star of this film.
The film illustrates the true importance of its subject. Based
on the book by William Bryant Logan, Dirt:
Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, it draws attention to the top six inches of
soil as living and breathing and among the most vital parts of life as we know
it.
Dirt! The MovieIndustrial agriculture’s use of nitrogen fertilizers,
pesticides, and monocultures are having devastating effects on the state of our
dirt. We are doing something very dangerous to life itself: We are treating our dirt like dirt, an
expression whose meaning should change to “treating something with great respect
and care.”
The filmmakers and dirt-matologists, Bill Benenson and Gene
Rosow, have combined information, passion, compelling storytelling and humor in
a rich way to cast a radiant light upon a not often thought about subject. Their animated personification of dirt in the
film, Digby, is a source of adorableness and ample guffaws throughout a
screening. Playing in the dirt makes the film something for children and
adults.
Like a good environmental film, Dirt! aims to be more than a movie. It seeks to be a movement. It
educates and encourages viewers to compost, buy from local agriculture
producers and have relationships with them, and screen the film wherever they
live to help more people get the dirt (the good kind) on dirt.
After screening at Sundance this year, the film will be
aired nationwide on PBS. You can see it during Earth Day week on Tuesday, April
20.
After happily getting my nails dirty, I came up for air and
light to see a film about the power of light itself and the politics that have
slower solar power called A Road Not Taken, about Pres. Jimmy
Carter’s solar panels.
In 1979, Pres. Carter installed the solar panels on the
White House roof, at a time when the oil crisis and the Iran hostage crisis
were making our relationship to oil seem all the more questionable. He asked us as a nation to look at our
consumption and change.
A Road Not TakenNot surprisingly, the panels were removed in 1986 by Pres. Reagan
before making their way to Unity College in Maine in the early ‘90s
The filmmakers are two Swiss artists who were taken by the
history and symbolism of the panels. The film journeys back in time to the
installation of the panels, with well-placed archival footage and actual
speeches by Pres. Carter. The young
artists and students then take a road trip with the panels in tow to the
American History Museum, trying to secure a rightful place there.
The panels were unfortunately rejected from the museum. Though,
not to give away the ending, the film screened at the American History Museum—a sign that the sunshine machine was let in.
A funny, sad, weird, and illuminating film, it is worth a
watch, as were so many others at the festival. These three movies just begin to scratch the
surface of the embarrassment of environmental cinematic riches that the
Environmental Film Festival has to offer.
By all means, take in the offerings yourself! If you’re in D.C. this weekend, you can check
out the blossoms and some of the films before the festival ends. If you’re an out-of-towner, have a gander and
find out where to watch the impressive list of films here.
Related Links:
Old gumball machines give guerrilla gardeners easy ammo
How export-focused agriculture has failed everyone it was meant to help
Have Jesus’ disciples been overeating?