Film

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.

Laura Torenbeek was working for a film school when she noticed a problem. While overseeing student projects, she discovered the volume of waste that the young film workers produced, and felt that something had to be done.

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.

Italian-born Susanna della Sala is a director, author and visual artist. Last Stop Before Chocolate Mountain is her latest project – a documentary born from personal life experience that both tells the story and captures the spirit of Bombay Beach, a once abandoned town in the harsh California desert, situated on the shores of a toxic lake, that is now home to a small eclectic community where art heals people in the most unexpected ways.

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.