Award-Winning Films For A Sustainable Future

Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

In the field, we accompany a biologist responsible for the implementation of renaturation solutions, the most coherent with the activities already present. A series of hedgerows planted to ensure bocage continuity is a typical means of providing food and shelter for small mammals involved in an ecosystem that includes cultivated fields and wild lands. Compromises are made to allow continued passage with farm machinery. The viewer discovers that it is possible to observe significant changes in biodiversity if one is attentive to the smallest phenomena, such as the return of butterflies that had disappeared. Through the testimonies of involved farmers, we learn that synergies between animals, plants and farms increasingly make it possible to do without chemical substitutes, those that have long accompanied the productivist approach on which agriculture is still largely dependent. From the scouting in the middle of winter, to the informal meetings between participants discussing in the middle of the heat wave, the film shows from the inside an experience of active awareness but not without its paradoxes. How to reconcile issues as remote as profitability and biodiversity.

As a wildlife filmmaker, there are times when I want to tell a deeper story, one that is more accurately classified as natural history. This is my interpretation of the area where I live through the eyes of the mountains that surround my home, the San Juan Mountains, and in particular, Pagosa Peak.

After his father's death, Yusuf goes back to his village, which he has not been to for years, and learns that a geothermal company wants to buy his father's agricultural lands and drill a well. He wants to solve problems without disrespecting his father's memory, but things don't go as he hoped.