Grey Lynn 2030 Transition Community

Here is the video below – come along this Wednesday for the screening

Water Whisperers Tangaroa is a film that celebrates ten communities facing serious water issues, who come up with amazingly simple solutions.

read More about Water Whisperers over here

Due to it being Queens Birthday we are moving from our customary end of the month to a new date.

Friday 5th June.

7.30 Grey Lynn Community Centre

510 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn

$2

The film is Manufactured Landscapes.

Synopsis

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.

The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution.

With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.

In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and RIVERS AND TIDES, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.

AWARDS
Best Documentary Feature – Toronto Film Critics Association
Best Canadian Feature – Toronto Film Critics Association
Best Canadian Feature – Toronto Film Festival
Best Documentary – Genie Awards

Listen to the Q&A with Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky at New York’s Film Forum

You may also view a 34 minute presentation from TED by Edward Burtynsky which includes more of the back story about the project.

Green Screen lauched in February with 50 or so people attending.

We were thrilled and inspired by the response.

We are now planning to run Green Screen, the last Friday of each month. Please it in your diaries. We will be screening, hard to get underground movies, with a sustainbility, environmental theme.

This month though, the hall is only available on Friday 20th March so our next screening is as follows.

This film lead to this site 11th Hour Action

11th Hour Narrated by Leonardo deCaprio – see comments here 

Grey Lynn Community Centre – 510 Richmond Rd at 7.30pm  - $2 Friday 2oth March

11th Hour Trailer

Here is a review from the New York Times by MANOHLA DARGIS

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps. To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn’t sunk in. That’s one reason “The 11th Hour,” an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

The problem looks overwhelming, literally, as demonstrated by the images of overflowing landfills and sickeningly polluted bodies of water that flicker through the movie like damning evidence. Structured in mainstream fiction-film fashion (in other words, like a term paper), it opens with an introduction that presents the case, builds momentum with an absorbing analytical middle section and wraps up with just enough optimism that I didn’t want to run home and stick my head in an energy-efficient oven. No matter how well intentioned, political documentaries that present problems without real-life, real-time, real-people solutions — an 800 number, an address, something — just add to the noise (pollution), becoming another title on some filmmaker’s résumé as well as a temporary salve for the audience’s guilt.

Written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and narrated on- and off-camera by Leonardo DiCaprio, who served as one of the producers, “The 11th Hour” attempts to stave off helplessness, and the nihilism that often follows it, mostly by appealing to our reason.

In one interview snippet after another, dozens of scientists, activists, gurus, policy types and even a magical-mushroom guy go through the arguments, present the data and criticize the anti-green faction, putting words to the images that are liberally interspersed between these talking heads like mortar. Every so often, Mr. DiCaprio pops up on screen to interrupt this show and tell, squinting into the camera and pushing the narrative to the next topic.

If your head isn’t lodged in the sand, much of what’s said in the movie will be agonizing and familiar. Gasping children, disappearing animals, gushing oil, billowing smoke, dying lakes, emptying forests, warming weather — the list of ills is numbingly familiar. In the movie’s eye-catching opener, the directors riffle through a veritable catalog of timely snapshots, some obvious (a smoggy skyline), others less so (a human fetus).

Effectively blunt, this sequence provoked a colleague to invoke the name of the avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage, but the truer visual and structural model here is a film like “Koyaanisqatsi,” with its streaming global landscapes. The difference is that the images in “The 11th Hour” are pointedly horrifying, not reassuring, pacific or aestheticized.

That can make it tough to watch, which the directors clearly know. They whip through the pictures and the interviews fast — at times a little too fast — and keep the information flowing as quickly as the visuals. This swift, steady pace means that you receive a lot of bad news from a lot of different sources. The ecologist Brock Dolman explains, “When we started feeding off the fossil fuel cycle, we began living with a death-based cycle.” From there the topic nimbly jumps to climate change, national security (courtesy the former director of the C.I.A., R. James Woolsey), Katrina, asthma and the stunning news from the oceanographer and author Sylvia Earle that “we’ve lost 90 percent of most of the big fish in the sea.”

Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not over yet. Many of those same sober talking heads also argue with equal passion that we can save ourselves, along with the sky above us and the earth below. The capacity for human beings to fight, to rise to the occasion, as Mr. Woolsey notes, invoking America’s rapid, albeit delayed jump into World War II, gives hope where none might seem possible.

It is our astonishing capacity for hope that distinguishes “The 11th Hour” and that speaks so powerfully, in part because it is this all-too-human quality that may finally force us to fight the good fight against the damage we have done and continue to do. As the saying goes, keep hope alive — and if you’re holding this review in your hands, don’t forget to recycle the paper.

“The 11th Hour” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has freakily scary environmental images.