SCREEN

Session XVI:

Azerbaijan - The Last Kankan of Nakhchivan (Azerbaijan): In less than twenty years, nearly two billion people could face water shortages. But one country–Azerbaijan, which sits between Europe and Western Asia–has come up with an ingenious solution to its water crisis. Through rehabilitating ancient methods of water delivery from distant remote mountains, the community of Nakhchivan, a province of Azerbaijan, restores balance in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner providing pure water all year around without the need for external energy sources. After the collapse of the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, water became scarce in the province of Nakhchivan. The Soviet-built water delivery system fell into disrepair, and following severe water shortages threatened the lives of inhabitants. In arid Nakhchivan, with a population of 4,000, ancient Kahrizes have been rediscovered. The almost forgotten man-made tunnels that take underground water to the surface through gravity flow are being restored and providing pure water in a reliable and efficient manner. An ancient technology has re-emerged out of necessity and is now being passed on to future generations of Kankans in Nakhchivan.

Houston - We Have a Problem (USA): Houston—We Have a Problem steps inside the energy capital of the world to see the hard truths about oil, from the Texas oilmen themselves. For decades American presidents have cried the woes of our nation’s addiction to foreign oil. Hollow campaign promises project a future that can be independent and sustainable. Yet the truth is, the energy policy of the USA has only been a strategy of defense, not offense. We are fighting a cold war on energy, and both Wall Street and Main Street have no idea what to do. We will see a new form of Wildcatting in alternatives, and learn how many oilmen believe that being shackled to cheap oil is only destroying our empire. Many old timers realize that the oil industry must change, advising that it is going to take everything to meet America’s future energy needs. The film includes interviews with: Neil Bush, of the Bush family; Jim Hacket, CEO of Anadarko; John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil; Bobby Parker, chairman of Parker Drilling; John Schiller, CEO of Energy XI; Greg Davis, president of Davis Petroleum; Matt Simmons, oil expert, author and chairman of Simmons & Company; Clayton Williams, president Claydesta Oil & Gas; Bill While, mayor of Houston, Texas; Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club; Joanne King Herring, Middle East ambassador and Afghanistan advisor; Steve Munson, CEO of Vulcan Power Company; Senator Harry Reed, U.S. Senate Majority Leader; and T. Boone Pickens, wind investor, chairman BP Capital.

Following the films will be a panel with the topic “New Energy – New Attitudes,” co-presented with the Stanford Alumni Association.

Session XVII:

Black Wave - The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (Canada/USA): On March 24th, 1989, when a drunken captain allows the Exxon Valdez supertanker to run aground on a reef, millions of gallons of crude oil are spilled in the pristine waters of Alaska. It is the biggest environmental disaster in North American history. But Exxon reacts quickly. “You’re lucky it happened with Exxon, because we do business straight,” a company spokesman tells hundreds of despairing fishermen. “It won’t take twenty years to solve all this.” Fast forward twenty years. In Alaska’s little fishing town of Cordova, a native sculptor carves a ‘shame Exxon’ totem pole, featuring the spokesman’s famous promise, “We will make you whole.” That has not happened. Cordova’s families face poverty as a result of the herring fishery’s collapse. A fishers’ lawsuit obtains the biggest jury award in American judicial history—5.5 billion dollars—yet Exxon stalls the case for more than a decade while fishers go broke.

Seed Hunter (Australia/Russia/Tajikistan): Scientists are exploring many solutions to adapt our food supply, including going back to mother nature herself to locate the genes that can withstand our changing climate; genes that, thanks to a high yielding monoculture, have almost disappeared. Australian scientist, Dr. Ken Street, aka the ‘Seed Hunter,’ spends his life searching for the tiny seeds that could play a role in helping food producers around the world. This film follows Dr. Ken, the Indiana Jones of agriculture, on a journey from the drought-ravaged farms of Australia, to the heart of the Middle East, to the mountains of Tajikistan. It is in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan that he and his team of ‘gene detectives’ are most likely to find seeds like the elusive wild chickpea that can survive in temperatures of 40 degrees above and below zero. Sounds simple enough until you realize that land clearing, urbanization and modern farming systems have all but wiped out these ancient food sources. But the prize for ‘Seed Hunter’ Ken Street is the rare wild chickpea, whose tough resilient genes could help transform the modern chickpea, enabling it to be grown by more people. At journey’s end, Ken travels deep into the Arctic to deliver his precious bounty of seed to the impenetrable ‘doomsday vault,’ built as a back up for the world’s seed supply of every food type known to human kind.

Session XVIII:

Crude (Equador/USA): Crude takes place in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, pitting 30,000 indigenous and colonial rainforest dwellers against the U.S. oil giant Chevron. The plaintiffs claim that Texaco—which merged with Chevron in 2001—spent three decades systematically polluting one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and poisoning the water, air and land. Crude explores the ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ case from all angles, weaving together the legal drama with examinations of the complex worlds our main characters navigate, including contemporary Latin American politics, celebrity activism and NGO’s, the media, corporate responsibility and accountability, and the effects of industrialization on indigenous cultures. Filmmakers gained access to players on all sides—including interviews with Chevron attorneys and the company’s chief environmental scientist—capturing the drama as it unfolded while the case grew from a little-known legal story to an international cause célèbre. Crude focuses on the human cost of our addiction to oil and a monumental effort to hold a major corporation accountable for its past deeds. This film is co-presented with the Center for Latin American Studies.

The Age of Stupid (France/India/Iraq/Jordan/Nigeria/UK): It’s the year 2055 and runaway climate change has ravaged the planet. Pete is the founder of The Global Archive, a storage facility located in the (now melted) Arctic, preserving all of humanity’s achievements in the hope that the planet might one day be habitable again. Or that intelligent life may arrive and make use of all that we’ve achieved. He pulls together clips of “archive” news and documentary from 1950-2008 to build a message showing what went wrong and why. The film uses real documentary footage to move between six main stories that range from Hurricane Katrina to melting Alpine glaciers. This ambitious documentary/drama/animation set in the devastated world of the future, asks the question: “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance?”