2011 Enviromental Film Festival at Yale- FREE!

So, it shouldn't be much of a stretch to see the connection between a love of good food and an enduring concern for our environment. Naturally since we all want to consume the best produce, grains, etc., we don't want to have our Earth contaminated since that affects what we eat. Thus, worthwhile to check out and educate yourself about is what's happening globally. Yale has a yearly Enviromental Film Festival and it is free and open to the public. Here are some of the highlights.

WASTELAND

Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage  dump,  Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of "catadores"  --  self-designated pickers of recyclable materials.  Muniz's initial objective was to "paint" the  catadores  with  garbage.  However, his  collaboration  with  these  inspiring  characters  as  they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores  as  they  begin  to  re-imagine their lives.

CONNECTED

Between texts and tweets, memes and microchips, we’ve become conditioned to break the world down into byte-sized bits. In the process we’ve stopped seeing the forest for the trees, never mind the root system that connects them all. In Connected, Tiffany Shlain—award-winning filmmaker and founder of The Webby Awards—sets out to explore these bonds with the help of her father, acclaimed author and thinker Dr. Leonard Shlain. When the unexpected happens during the making of the film, Tiffany is forced to reexamine everything she thought she knew about life, relationships, and connectedness. Tracing interdependence through history, she discovers the surprising links between right brain and left; alphabets and power; honey bees and stress; hormones and happiness; technology and nature; progress and consequences; and parents and children. The result is a personal film with universal resonance that encourages viewers to make connections of their own. Offering an exhilarating stream-of-consciousness ride, Connected is a journey through the interconnectedness of humankind, nature, progress and morality at the dawn of the 21st century. For centuries we’ve been declaring independence. With insight, curiosity, and humor, this film explores whether it’s time to declare our interdependence.

BAG IT

BAG IT follows Jeb Berrier, an average American guy who is admittedly not a “tree hugger,” who makes a pledge to stop using plastic bags. This simple action gets Jeb thinking about all kinds of plastic as he embarks on a global tour to unravel the complexities of our plastic world. When Jeb’s journey takes a personal twist, we see how our crazy-for-plastic world has finally caught up to us and what we can do about it. Today. Right now. The film examines our society’s use and abuse of plastic. The film focuses on plastic as it relates to our society’s throwaway mentality, our culture of convenience, our over consumption of unnecessary, disposable products and packaging—things that we use one time and then, without another thought, throw them away. Where is AWAY?? Away is over flowing landfills, clogged rivers, islands of trash in our oceans, and even our very own toxic bodies. Jeb travels the globe on a fact-finding mission—not realizing that after his simple resolution, plastic will never look the same again!

Wasteland is playing tonight at 7pm. You can check out the rest of the scheduled films, times, location, etc on this website: http://www.environment.yale.edu/film/films