Mountain Top Removal & The Planet
Two films at this year’s 32nd Cleveland International Film Festival March 6 – 16
Review By: Jared Earley, Cleveland-based film festival staffer & freelance reviewer
The ultimate energy-efficient vehicle for touring the globe returns this year to Tower City Cinemas in downtown Cleveland with an 11-day expedition that includes stops in nearly 60 nations. The 32nd Cleveland International Film Festival arrives March 6-16, boasting a lineup of more than 120 feature films and 100 short subjects from around the world. This year’s festival introduces a new section, “It’s Easy Being Green,” highlighting recent films with an environmental agenda. It is a topical addition that should allow the festival to address (and plug into) the growing audience of environmentally conscious filmgoers.
“We’ve introduced this off-shoot to the ‘Standing Up’ (films with a conscience) section in response to peaked interest in environmentalism,” explains CIFF Director of Programming Bill Guentzler. “It’s a selection of environmental films that will, hopefully, create discussion and help solve some issues.” Among the collection of films in the “Being Green” sidebar, Mountain Top Removal and The Planet are two informative new documentaries that examine the harmful effects many of our living habits have on the planet, and a special “Film Forum” screening of Mountain Top Removal is set to include an audience-participation panel discussion of these problems.
The title of Mountain Top Removal refers to a destructive mining process where extreme cutting and explosives blast away the earth’s mountaintop surface. Discarded elements are transferred to fill area valleys, and the topological and ecological makeup of a region is impacted—introducing toxic stress to the eco-system and often to the surrounding communities and economies, as well.
The film’s focus is on a small West Virginian town in the Appalachian Mountains (the most common U.S. site for this particular practice), where it observes the casual destruction of a group of citizens and their community, as coal manufacturing takes its toll on their everyday lives, and political interests divide them.
When Massey Energy (the local culprit and fourth-largest producer of coal in the entire U.S.) plots to expand the company’s presence by constructing a silo 250 feet away from Marsh Fork Elementary School, a group of citizens are empowered to raise public awareness and draw government attention to the negative health and environmental impact Massey operations have had on the surrounding region. Bearing outspoken slogan t-shirts to support their cause (“Stop destroying my mountains!”—God), the vocal team devises a series of strategies to garner state and local support, embarking on peaceful protests and demonstrations in the capital, even surprising the Governor with a manipulative introduction to a Marsh Fork second-grader.
To its benefit, the film closely follows the point-of-view of local community members and grassroots environmental organizations (such as Mountain Justice Summer—whose informative website is ww.mountainjusticesummer.org), rather than that of scientists and policy-makers. It is also carefully even-handed, including interviews with supporters who (quite reasonably) see the economic benefit of a major corporation like Massey in their own backyard.
One featured resident is the humble wife of a Massey laborer, who depends on her husband’s working-class income to feed and clothe her family of four. Another self-described “hillbilly” is actually an informed resident whose granddaughter attends Marsh Fork, and is fed up with the blisters, colds and headaches her grandchild complains of—cited as a result of dust and debris from the nearby coal processing plant. And while it would be easy to coast on such sympathetic claims alone, the film wisely follows up with shocking footage exposing the presence of harmful toxins in neighborhood parks and private residences alike.
Although there is no doubt about the devastating and crucial nature of the documentary’s content, the film itself is pretty dryly structured, assembled in a straightforward, fact-dispensing manner, with a sleepy-sounding narrator to boot. Mountain Top Removal throws a surplus of numbers at the viewer—and fast. But when the information sticks, it sticks big, as in the astonishing figure that West Virginia coal produces 50 percent of the country’s electricity, and that the current rate of mountain top removal shows a projected loss of an area the size of Delaware within the next ten years.
The Planet, an essay film from Scandanavia, also slings a staggering slew of startling statistics, but with a much wider focus—and boasting a much slicker design. Opening with a long list of physical signs of environmental stress (shrinking forests, growing deserts, eroding soils, rising temperatures, more destructive storms, rising sea levels…), we are informed that humans are the only earthlings endowed with the ability to drive another species extinct, and we are reminded that a chance for easy escape from such problems has diminished. The Planet argues that just as it is possible for us to spend more money than we earn, it is possible (and likely) that humans can consume more resources than what can be naturally replenished—and that if everyone in the world lived like Americans, we would need five planets to survive.
While certainly not the bearer of good news, The Planet is a surprisingly upbeat and shrewdly effective documentary. As if in response to one of its interview subjects—who states that, “Humans don’t react well to scare tactics, or a doomsday-style delivery of information,” and that, as an instinctive survival mechanism, we suppress any threatening information we receive. The Planet avoids inducing anxiety, thanks to its hyper visual style and well-designed delivery of information. As stylish as it is provocative, the film features dazzling aerial photography alongside brutal scientific images, and radically colorized images to accompany interview sound bytes—which are often then remixed into electronic music. It is a refreshingly energetic and slickly produced package, which finds sound and visual patterns to create enticing and deceptive rhythms sourcing both content and style.
Often accompanying the images, however, are the sobering revelations that 2,500 tons of electronic waste is shipped to Nigeria every month, that emissions in China and India have risen 65-80 percent since 1992, that one European citizen, on average, consumes 50 tons of the earth’s resources each year, and that the number of free-roaming gorillas in the world (one of humans’ closest animal relatives) has decreased from 100,000 in 1985, to only 20,000 today.
Is the animal’s fate a forecast of our own human demise? Near its end, The Planet describes a prediction that, due to environmental shortages, civilization will eventually break down into “more fragmented, divided, and combative societies.” But without sugar coating any facts, or conversely, seeming horrific, The Planet returns to its underlying message: that science doesn’t have “the answer,” and that planetary “problems” are our own problems to deal with.
Program Guides for the Cleveland International Film Festival (and the “It’s Easy Being Green” showcase) will become available in mid February, and tickets go on sale February 25 (or February 18 for Cleveland Film Society members). For more information about the festival, call 216-623-3456, or visit www.clevelandfilm.org.
Jared Earley is a Cleveland-based freelance contributor and Administrative Director of the Ingenuity Festival of Art + Technology.