When I first started getting into film making, I went to LA and talked with some pretty famous producers. One of them mentored me. She showed me the film Saviors of the Forest. Afterward she said, “You’ve got to tell a story, Carolyn. You can have just talking heads like DiCaprio’s film The 11th Hour—which didn’t make it—or you can tell a story.”
Here are ten green documentaries that I love. Most are very funny, and every single one is smart and story-driven.
1. The Real Dirt on Farmer John
By John Peterson
This film is number one on my list. John Peterson started filming Farmer John twenty-five years ago, back in the sixties, when he was just a crazy artist farmer. He wears feather boas while plowing the fields! But then you see him go through a whole life crisis in the film. He almost loses the farm and in the end thousands of people help him. It’s heartwarming, heroic, and kickass funny.
2. Upstream Battle
By Ben Kempas
I just saw this film at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. It’s about how there are basically only two salmon left, up there among the Native Americans, and so they’re fighting to get rid of the dams, which are probably killing all the fish. It’s a positive film, but upsetting too. The Native Americans are so beautiful and they’re trying to live a lifestyle that isn’t congruent with modern America. It’s a great film.
3. The Future of Food
By Deborah Koons Garcia
This film is a must. It’s more serious than the others, but it tells the important story of GMOs and why they’re so dangerous, the politics, and Monsanto, the monster corporation that’s trying to patent life, patent seeds, and make farmers buy their pesticide-implemented seeds—seeds that are imbued with their own little poisons. It’s mind-blowing, this film.
4. Everything’s Cool
By Judith Helfand, Daniel B. Gold
Judith Helfland is wonderful and her new film Everything’s Cool is phenomenal. As a docmaker, Judith believes that docmakers have to be funny. She’s Michael Moore in a woman’s body and she uses humor really strikingly—she’s very raw and stinging, like Bill Maher. In Everything’s Cool, Judith profiles leaders in the environmental movement, like Bill McKibben, and demonstrates how we Americans are unaware of what’s happening in our environment.
