This weekend sees the opening of the UK Green Film Festival and, on Monday, the deadline of our very own Ideas Fund Green. As the worlds of film, photography and music embrace green issues like a dog embraces your lower leg, we thought it was time to look at the best and the boldest green entertainment out there…
Big River Man
Frankly – and I know I’m not alone here – I would love to make like Marcus Coates and head up the Amazon in the name of art. However, I am less thrilled by the idea of swimming with piranhas and having jungle worms wriggle up my ears. So instead, I will take inspiration from Big River Man – a 2009 documentary about Matrin Strel’s 3,300-mile swim up the Amazon River – and make my way up the river riding a fat Slovenian man like a giant hairy flesh-canoe.
Thomas P Peschak
For three weeks after watching Jaws, I point-blank refused to even get in the bath. So, how wildlife photographer Thomas P Peschak can swim with the toothy beasts, without peeing in his wetsuit, is totally beyond me. As a contributor to National Geographic Magazine and the Chief Photographer of the Save Our Seas Foundation, Pesach is quite simply one of the best wildlife photographers in the world.
Captain Planet
“Captain Planet, he’s a hero. Gonna take pollution down to zero.” He also looks suspiciously like a muscle-bound, blue Ziggy Stardust. This cartoon single-handedly saved the lives of at least 12 dolphins during the ’90s and inspired a thousand dreadful YouTube theme song covers by amateur hardcore bands.
The Cove
Talking of dolphins, if you like your sandwiches murder-flavoured, then you should watch this film about the strange and sinister world of secret coves, Japanese Mafia, water parks and dolphin massacre. Imagine the Bourne Identity, but with blowholes.
Chinatown
What you might forget – in the haze of ’30s LA film noir, knicker-combusting Jack Nicholson, understated tension and eyebrow-pluckingly beautiful Faye Dunaway – is that Chinatown is actually a thriller about drought, disappearing resources and a corporate cover-up.
Srinivas Kuruganti
Photographer and IdeasTap member Srinivas Kuruganti has spent the last 10 years travelling to India to document the environmental and cultural impact of industrialisation and pollution across the subcontinent. From his starkly beautiful black and white images of coal mining in Dhanbad to the coloured shots of industrial waste in the Patancheru district of Andhra Pradesh, to an investigation of bauxite mining in Orissa, his images are as powerful as they are discomforting.
Earth Song
Basically, this says it all. Apply to Ideas Fund Green with something as good as this and I will give you the £5,000 myself. (I won’t.)
To apply for Ideas Fund Green, visit the brief.
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