by aleida, on January 26th, 2010
The 2010 Los Angeles edition of Go Green Expo has come and gone, and we hope the organizers are happy with the results. Just like last year, the expo floor was packed on Saturday and Sunday, the “open to the public” days of the event. It was hard to get through the aisles, and the addition of a pet section really brought out a whole army of man’s best friends.
Kevin and I were happy to have walked the expo floor on Friday (the business-to-business day), so that on the weekend we focused almost exclusively on the eco-film showcase. This series was packed with short, extremely fascinating films.
Saturday’s showcase launched with the screening of Tapped, which explores the environmental and health impact of bottled water and of the bottles themselves. The Q+A with Stephanie Soechtig, the film’s director and producer (and sometimes intimidating interviewer), revealed that her and the film’s goal is not to ban bottled water altogether – she herself admitted the need for it in disaster relief efforts and everyday consumption in areas with polluted water supplies. Rather, her goal is to educate audiences so that they can learn to make informed decisions as to when bottled water should be consumed. She commented that, in the United States, “drinking bottled water at home is a lazy decision.” There are obviously cases in this country where people should not touch the water coming out of the tap, but for most of us, her assessment is likely very true. It was generally a very informative piece and very much worth a watch, so check it out.
After this screening, the Blue Planet Film Festival took over and showed five shorts, the standout being The Garden. Although this film makes it easy to be sympathetic to the effected farmers who are showcased, I was left with mixed emotions. It’s a story of big city politics, property ownership, food production, poor families, and money. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? There are good guys and bad guys, tragic figures, back room deals, secret meetings, potential corruption, and so much more. I can’t help feeling that the movie tells a very one-sided and totally biased account of events, with the farmers cast as protagonists, the property owner cast as antagonist, and the Los Angeles city government as a bungling group of morally corrupt intermediaries. However, it doesn’t take much digging to find that the circumstances surrounding the story are quite a bit muddier than the movie presents. It’s a film worth watching and one that covers an area of interest – urban farming – but it tells a good story in a flawed way. It left me wondering if I was the only one feeling uneasy about the film’s message. If you’ve seen it, let us know what you think.
Sunday morning focused exclusively on videos from the Green Living Project before handing the rest of the programming over to the second day of the Blue Planet Film Festival. The BPFF’s A Simple Question: The Story of STRAW was the standout of Sunday afternoon. The STRAW (Students & Teachers Restoring A Watershed) project is the object of focus, and the film tells a very transformative story of how one fourth-grader’s simple question led to an incredible community-based program that partners elementary school students with local landowners and that for the last seventeen years has worked to restore the watershed in Marin County, CA. After a five-year development process, the film was just released this month – this may have been its Los Angeles premier. We wish the filmmakers the best of luck as they work to bring the film to larger audiences.
And speaking of audiences, what a shame that there were so few people at the film screenings! We missed only one of the Saturday films, yet the largest audience we saw at any one of the screenings had perhaps thirty people. Most of the films had barely a dozen occupied seats. In a room that could easily accommodate at least one-hundred people, we were left wishing for more attendees.
Thanks, Go Green Expo, for a great event!