Award-Winning Films For A Sustainable Future

With a growth rate of up to a meter/day—the world record of living plants—and structural properties that in cases equal steel’s and concrete’s, bamboo is a versatile design material. A material that provide an interesting alternative in an ongoing contemporary material/sustainability dialogue. The Bamboo Dialogues seeks to answer the questions: What is this material? and Why are we not using more of it in contemporary design, engineering and architecture? The narrative of the movie spans five continents and is told by “ bamboo whisperers”: such as engineers, artisans, students, architects, designers, historians, biologists, and farmers as well as bamboo constructions and artifacts. The material in the movie is partly a crowd sourced. Successful contemporary projects and best practices in bamboo are mostly found off the beaten track and away from trendsetting metropolises in remote and peripheral areas and locations. Therefore, The Bamboo Dialogue would not have been possible to make during the restricted travel situation around the Covid 19 pandemic without the generous joint effort by a number of: institutions, companies, and individuals from around the globe. Bamboo have had a soft voice in the contemporary material discourse. The film seeks to amplifies this soft voice and showing possibilities and challenges for this miracle plant. The Bamboo Dialogues is the second movie in a series, portraying the versatile and sustainable material—bamboo. It follows the successful documentary Bamboo—the Tradition of the Future.

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

The drought and the lack of water supplies in the capital city of Iran (Tehran), is a horrendous problem nowadays. The lakes of Tehran's area are all dried, some of the farmers have got to irrigate their farms by a kind of drainage to produce adequate harvest. This documentary proves that these problems have historical reasons and background in the political history of Iran in the last century. In addition to this historical and scientific view, The director shows that the fear of drought and famine in Iran is one of the major issues in Persian mythologies and legends. Narration of the film uses a poetic language to combine a mythological story about drought with the historical realities according to this specific topic: There's a dreadful dragon in Persian mythology, who is immortal and responsible for drought. Water crisis in Tehran contemporary history is a major problem too; and a dry land is a sign of the return of the dragon.

Twenty minutes outside of Visalia, amidst the seemingly endless rows of citrus trees, Yolanda Cuevas packs enchiladas with shredded chicken for her husband Benjamin, their adult daughters and two teenaged grandchildren in her modest single-story home. Their house is the first one off the main drag, one of 83 lining the two crumbling roads that comprise the tiny town of Tooleville. Yolanda must wash the tomatoes for the salsa first in the sink and then again with a splash of clean water from a 5-gallon jug. The process is arduous, and though she’s resigned to do it, she’s not happy about it. Along with Tooleville’s several hundred other residents, Yolanda’s family has survived on bi-weekly delivery of water to their homes for the past 12 years. It’s an annoyance for the family, and it’s expensive for the State of California, which has been paying for the replacement water since the discovery of Chromium-6 (the same chemical featured in Erin Brokovich) in the water. The simpler solution would be to consolidate the town’s water system with that of its larger, affluent neighbor to the west, Exeter. And for this purpose, Yolanda has become a reluctant activist, attending community meetings in Tooleville and lobbying for consolidation at Exeter’s city council meetings under the expert guidance of Pedro Hernandez, an organizer with the Leadership Counsel. While Exeter has resisted the consolidation since it was first proposed, organizers like Pedro feel that this could be the year Exeter finally succumbs to the growing community pressure and brings Tooleville into the fold. The decision will echo around the Central Valley and across the state, as hundreds of similar community water systems find themselves in a nearly identical predicament.