Documentaries

In honor of Earth Day on April 22, we would like to celebrate some of the most recent documentaries that raise critical environmental issues. Environmental documentaries are becoming increasingly popular.

Arriving just in time to celebrate Earth Day comes the 10-part Apple documentary series, Big Beasts, narrated by English actor Tom Hiddleston. Big Beasts filmed over four years, takes audiences on an epic journey around the globe, from freezing poles to tropical rainforests to meet nature’s most captivating giants.

Every once in a while, there comes a story that is both uplifting and painful. Very often this combination creates the best art, as is the case with Algiers, America, a five-part documentary series about the country’s most successful high school football team in one of the most dangerous places in the nation.

Hosted by global conservation scientist and CEO of Conservation International Dr. M.

It was a desire to protect her community that led Marta Cunningham from being an actor to becoming a director. Her compassion for the young trans girl Latisha King and her family after she was gunned down by a classmate in 2011, made Cunningham venture into a new career path.

On Feb 25, 2020, Anders Hofman completed the first long-distance triathlon in Antarctica, the Iceman. His goal was to show that limitations are mere perceptions.

If, as psychiatrist Viktor Frankl opined, the meaning of life is to give life meaning, then what of the objects, both big and small, that power our lives but leave behind no small amount of waste? What meaning can be derived in how we treat this material? And what separate meaning, if any, exists in these items themselves? Those are among the questions pondered by Stacey Tenenbaum’s Scrap, an utterly singular and highly ruminative documentary, from First Run Features, now available on DVD and streaming on Amazon and Apple TV. In imaginative fashion, Scrap runs an end-around on more typical environmental nonfiction film posturing.

RiverBlue, an unprecedented documentary, made its mark in 2017 highlighting a powerful question: could fashion possibly save the planet? It portrayed some incredibly stunning, yet at times, shocking images that left us forever changed by the way we look at fashion, and fixated on the impact that the clothes we wear have on our climate and planet. Perhaps the most shocking element in the film is the exposure to the gloomy side of the consumer’s beloved blue jeans.

There has been a Laemmle in the movie business literally almost since there has ever been a movie industry. After quitting his job in his late 30s and buying up a series of nickelodeons before then transitioning into the film rental and distribution markets, Carl Laemmle challenged Thomas Edison’s monopoly on moving pictures, and in 1912 co-founded Universal Pictures.

Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire takes viewers on a journey with the top experts from across the nation to better understand wildfire. The film begins with the harrowing escape from Paradise, California on November 8, 2018, after the town ignited from wind-driven embers and burned within a few hours of the fire’s start- and continues on to revisit more recent record-shattering fires.