Why Not?

My Grandmother’s Sketchbook: Under Mont Blanc

A 30-year-old sketchbook leads Max Romey to the Mont Blanc region. The Alaska-based watercolor artist and environmental advocate sets out to follow in the footsteps of his grandmother, who visited this landscape in the late 1990s and captured it in dozens of drawings. With mountain guide Hillary Gerardi, Max attempts to locate each sketch’s exact origin point. Many match perfectly—until the Mer de Glace throws him off course. The glacier has changed too much in 30 years to recognize.

Koyaanisqatsi

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

Antarctica, a legacy mission

While emptying her grandparents' house, director Jeanne Lefevre discovers the journal kept by her grandfather during a scientific mission to Adélie Land, French Antarctic Territory, in 1960. Atomic engineer Bruno Parlier had never spoken of this trip to his family. With her archives in hand, Jeanne decides to follow in his footsteps, to Antarctica.

Back from the Brink: Saved from Extinction

The remarkable true story of three animal species rescued from the brink of extinction: California’s enchanting Channel Island Fox, China’s fabled Golden Monkey, and the wondrous migrating crabs of Christmas Island. Discover successful, heartfelt, and ingenious human efforts to rescue endangered species around the world.

Higher Grounds

Panama is reimagining coffee, and driving new standards for both quality and economics. Explores variety, farming practice, and processing innovation—notions traditionally associated only with winemaking. Through collaborative competition, Panamanian growers are banding together to raise the bar for coffee worldwide. Featuring interviews with award-winning coffee producers in Panama and global coffee celebrities, as well as stunning footage of Panama’s breathtaking highlands, Higher Grounds concludes with a hard look at the sustainability of specialty coffee, the implications for developing-region producers, and how Panama offers a model for the rest of the world.

Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?

The little-known story of the accelerating destruction of our forests for fuel - the policy loopholes, huge subsidies, and blatant green washing of the burgeoning biomass electric power industry.

Prêts pour la décroissance?

A New Inferno

Filmed during the hottest days of Phoenix, Arizona’s summer heatwave, A New Inferno follows paramedics as they race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment: ice immersion therapy.

A Wild Idea: The Birth of the APA

The creation of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) in 1971 and the impact it has had on the development of the park over the years. Most of the land within the park is privately owned, yet the Adirondacks remain largely undeveloped.

A Wolf in the Suburbs

Welcome to Mississauga where lawns are clipped, neighbors are watchful and no blade of grass dares misbehave. Except at Wolf Ruck’s place. His lawn grows wild, and so does the trouble.

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea

The Salton Sea: An inland ocean of massive fish kills, rotting resorts, and 120 degree nights located just minutes from urban Southern California. This film details the rise and fall of the Salton Sea, from its heyday as the "California Riviera" where boaters and Beach Boys mingled in paradise to its present state of decaying, forgotten ecological disaster.

De Queeste

In search of a more sustainable food system, three organic farming pioneers discuss their hopes and doubts with a spectrum of experts and stakeholders.

Chernobyl Heart

This Academy Award-winning documentary takes a look at children born after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster who have been born with a deteriorated heart condition.

Waterlife

Waterlife is a documentary film about the Great Lakes that follows the flow of the lakes' water from the Nipigon River to the Atlantic Ocean. The film's goal is to take viewers on a tour of an incredibly beautiful ecosystem that is facing complex challenges.

When Glaciers Go

A diminishing water supply is driving people from their land in a remote region of Nepal. The younger generation of the Gurung family adapts by commuting from their ancestral home, where subsistence depends on grazing goats and cows, to a village that has a commercial apple orchard, fed by irrigation. “We cannot give up cultivating our fields,” a elderly man explains. “The apple farm is not going to be able to feed us easily.” The older generation believes that water shortages stem from road building and bulldozing, upsetting the natural order, a young man explains. Both generations fly prayer flags, beseeching water.

La mesure des choses

Political film essay in which events happening around the Mediterranean Sea are compared to the myth of Icarus.

Specters of Watch Oak

Mariners Marsh, Bloomfield, Watchogue, Old Place. History, mythology, nature, anthropogenic industry, and digitally-demarcated landscape collide in the salt meadows and brownfield beaches of northwestern Staten Island. A human-haunted nature film. All stories are ghost stories. Narration drawn from the writings of Staten Island's preeminent historian, naturalist, and mythographer William T. Davis (1862 - 1945).

Le royaume des nuages