This screening of both feature and short environmental films includes Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal, that documents Edward Burtynsky’s travels observing changes in landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing. A wide range of films takes the viewer from the Arctic Circle where a town is fighting to survive, to Ecuador, where The Curse of Copper explores the threat of mining to the biodiversity of a mountain and its people. Closer to home, underground mine fires that have destroyed a Pennsylvanian town are the subject of The Town that Was.

Tickets: $7 Member/$10 General/Free for children under 12. For reservations call 718-549-3200 x305.

Screening Schedule

Short films are screened Saturday and Sunday, 11am–2:30pm. Feature film Manufactured Landscapes will be shown on Saturday, 2:30pm. The Town that Was will be screened Sunday, 2:30pm.

Feature Films

Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal. Photographer Edward Burtynsky travels the world observing changes in landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing.

The Town that Was, directed by Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland, is a portrait of John Lokitis, the youngest of 11 remaining residents of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town destroyed by an underground mine fire.

Short Films

Ambassadors of the Arctic, directed by Sharon Pieczenik. Learn about Polar Bears International Leadership Camp, where select students come to learn about polar bears and their dwindling natural habitat.

Polarized, directed by Amy Berg gives a voice to the people of Shishmaref, who are fighting for their increasingly unstable and melting homeland.

High Water Line, directed by Justin Lange, documents the artist Eve Mosher conducting her project High Water Line in New York City and people’s response to it. Mosher physically demarcates a line ten feet above sea level, estimating the extent of increased flooding brought on by stronger and more frequent storms, themselves the result of climate change.

The Curse of Copper, produced by Friends of the Earth. The people of Intag, Ecuador, are fighting to keep out a Canadian mining company whose activity would destroy their homeland and further damage the once thriving biodiversity of the area.

Baked Alaska, directed by Steve Kroschel presents the debate over whether or not to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Native Alaskans are divided on the choice between a new source of revenue-generating jobs for the people and preserving their wilderness and wildlife.

The Fires of the Amazon, directed by Adrian Cowell. The forests of Amazonia are being depleted through clearing and the method of choice is fire. The film surveys the situation and what is being done to remedy it.

Yukon Circles, produced by Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, tells the inspiring story of how indigenous populations in Alaska and Canada came together to protect the Yukon River. The Yukon is the second-longest river in North America and is threatened by pollution from military, mining, manufacturing and human settlement.

Wildland, directed by Doug Hawes-Davis and Drury Gunn Carr, provides a cross country view of American wild lands, underling the need to care for and protect them.