Sunday, April 12 at 7:00pm | $8 |
The Portland EcoFilm Festival Best Feature Film and Best Short Film Award winners will be screened!
Best Short Film: To Be Announced
Best Feature: HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD chronicles an eclectic group of young pioneers who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Alaska and ended up founding Greenpeace, thereby launching the worldwide green movement. Greenpeace was founded on tight-knit, passionate friendships forged in Vancouver in the early 1970s. Together they pioneered a template for environmental activism which mixed daring iconic feats and worldwide media: placing small rubber inflatables between harpooners and whales, blocking ice-breaking sealing ships with their bodies, spraying the pelts of baby seals with dye to make them valueless in the fur market. The group had a prescient understanding of the power of media, knowing that the advent of global mass communications meant that the image had become a more effective tool for change than the strike or the demonstration. But by 1977, the organization had become a victim of its own anarchic roots, saddled with large debts and frequent in-fighting.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD draws on interviews with key players and hitherto unseen archival footage to bring to life these extraordinary characters and their intense, sometimes eccentric, and often dangerous world—detailing how Greenpeace as a group transcended the contradictions of its members to undertake some of the bravest and most significant environmental protests in history.