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Ten Ecological Documentaries
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The rise in awareness of green issues has brought with it an increase in documentary films addressing environmental themes. Alternatively frightening and inspirational, here are ten films about ecology and the environment that puts cinema to good use: educating and informing us about ways to preserve the Earth.
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10. An Inconvenient Truth
The film that kick-started interest in eco-docs, David Guggenheim’s account of former US Vice President Al Gore’s lecture on the danger posed by global warming was a world-wide sensation, taking more than $50 million at the box office alone and winning an Oscar for Best Documentary. Avoiding any political point-scoring, Gore lays out the facts as clearly as possible, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions as he weaves stark truths about now-unavoidable climate change with more personal observations about how humanity can connect with the natural world.
9. Who Killed The Electric Car?
Writer and director Chris Paine attempts to solve rising petrol prices, war for resources and the threat of pollution by considering an alternative means of mass transportation: the electric car. Not a new idea, Paine’s film details the history of the electric vehicle while methodically examining American car giant General Motor’s decision in the early 1990s to recall and destroy every electric car they built, even after investing billions into research and development, production and advertising.
8. Encounters at the End of the World
Wanting to witness life in Antarctica before climate change melts the polar caps, Werner Herzog takes his camera deep into the southern frozen wilderness to talk to the people who live there all year round. The result is a unique record of a society cut off from the rest of the world where a clearly fascinated Herzog (accompanied only by his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger) meets scientists, deep-sea divers, engineers and adventurers.
7. The 11th Hour
Produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this alarming documentary from sisters Leila and Nadia Conners assembles contributions from over 50 politicians, scientists, and environmental activists, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai to talk about the issue of global warming and the problems facing the world if and when the climate changes.
John Shenk's extraordinary documentary follows Mohammed Nasheed, elected President of the Maldives in 2008, as he confronts the threat of his beautiful island nation being submerged by rising sea levels brought about by global warming. As much a portrait of a passionate politician as it is an alarming report on the dire future faced by low-lying nations like the Maldives, Shenk's film is now something of a historical document itself as Nasheed's campaign was halted when his administration was overthrown by a military coup in February 2012.
5. Flow: For Love of Water
Essential for life and increasingly under threat from pollution, the issue of clean water defines the current ecological debate. Essential for life, Irena Salinas’ film tells the story of the diminishing supply of fresh water but beyond identifying the problem, offers potential fixes from the people and institutions providing practical, on-the-ground solutions. Salinas’ follows a trickle of data to show how this natural resource will soon be as expensive as oil, and just as carefully controlled by corporate and government interests.
4. Colony
In the autumn of 2006, beekeepers around the world began to report a disturbing phenomenon: their bees were dying at a tremendous rate, with some estimating they had lost 90% of the bees in their hives. As bees are essential to the pollination of countless fruits and vegetables, Colony Collapse Disorder (as it became known) was a very serious threat; environmentally and economically. Produced by Irish company Fastnet and directed by Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn, the film combines hair-raising facts and stories with extraordinarily beautiful imagery to explore the fragile balances at play in the natural world. Scientists still do not fully understand the problem and are yet to find a solution.
3. Food, Inc
Filmmaker Robert Kenner joins forces with writer and activist Eric Schlosser for a mind-boggling, stomach-churning analysis of the American food industry. Armed with reams of scientific data and expert opinions, the film chronicles the detrimental effects of mass-produced food on the environment; from the impact of intensive agriculture to over-fishing, deforestation and pollution. And that’s before you get to the factory, let alone the supermarket shelves.
2. The Cove
In his eye-opening exposé of the Japanese dolphin industry, director Louie Psihoyos’ Oscar-winning film assembled a team of guerrilla filmmakers, special effects technicians and eco-activists to capture previously unseen footage of the mass culling of dolphins in a remote fishing village. Psihoyos’ cameras (some carefully hidden at considerable risk) follow former dolphin trainer Rick O’Barry as he uncovers a sickening slaughter of the marine mammals, some of whom end up entering the food chain as “whale meat”.
1. Crude
The story behind the world's largest oil-related environmental lawsuit is played out as a David v Goliath story in documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s investigation into the so-called “Amazon Chernobyl,” an environmental disaster that occurred deep in the rain forests of Ecuador. Berlinger expertly outlines how an indigenous tribe were poisoned by the actions of an oil company, showing how their lives were destroyed by damage to their environment.
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Colony
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