The environment is on people’s minds more than than ever and as evidence there’s a bunch of screenings in Sydney in August of documentaries highlighting the challenges we all face.
On Tuesday August 22 you can catch a one-off screening of A Plastic Ocean by Australian journalist Craig Leeson at the Dendy Newtown. Shot on more than 20 locations over the past four years, A Plastic Ocean began when Leeson went out in search of the blue whale and instead found the ocean had been overrun by plastic waste. This hard-hitting doco uncovers alarming facts about plastic pollution and reveals working solutions that can be put into immediate use by the wider population.
Tickets are $20 + BF; five per cent of proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the Clean Coast Collective, who travel around the Australian coastline cleaning the beaches with their ‘Trash tribe’. The event is being hosted by the Ahimsa Collective.
Furious about Adani? Unclear on all the facts? On Friday August 11 at the North Sydney Community Centre there will be a screening of Guarding the Galilee, a half-hour documentary about the fight to stop the Adani Carmichael coal mine. Narrated by Michael Caton, the documentary explains the toll the mine would have on water resources, the climate and the reef, and how the Federal government wants to give $1 billion of taxpayers' money to an Indian billionaire to build a rail line to get the coal to the ocean to be shipped to India.
The film is directed and produced by Nell Schofield (beloved star of Puberty Blues) and Schofield will be taking part in a Q&A following the screening, along with president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Geoff Cousins. Tickets are $15.
Then there’s a film that opens in cinemas Australia-wide on August 10: former US vice president Al Gore in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Gore was in Australia recently to promote the documentary, the sequel to the 2006 film that sounded a clarion call about climate change. The news is pretty dire 11 years later; Gore lets his guard down this time and even loses his temper. With Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, wouldn’t you?
