Festival News

A week ago, Good Pitch held a gathering in San Francisco that was a platform for documentary filmmakers to network and fundraise. Having leveraged more than $3.4 million from various entities, Good Pitch (which was created by BritDoc and the Sundance Institute) selected seven films in various stages of production from applicants around the world. The filmmaking teams are then invited to present to an audience that is able to support these projects through funding and outreach.

In 2010, Mountainfilm in Telluride examined the issue of extinction for our Moving Mountains Symposium. The list of endangered creatures has been growing for generations, a crisis E.O. Wilson and other scientists say is caused by human destruction to natural habitats.

World governments have committed to try to halt the extinction of species and safeguard important biodiversity sites for nature by 2020, but this promise hasn’t seen much serious number crunching. Until now.

A recent study, published in Science, sets the price at $80 billion per year — the sum of $4 billion annually and another $76 billion to protect and manage key habitats.

Mountainfilm in Telluride 2012 focused on population, and although the Moving Mountains Symposium is over, we’re not closing the door on the discussion. It’s a many-layered subject and affects most every ecosystem on the planet.

In this video, Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities (who couldn’t make it to our symposium), outlines the complexity of the topic while simultaneously simplifying the difficult subject.

Before you begin, a few caveats:

1. The video is 43 minutes.
2. The intended audience is students who might consider demography as a course of study, but the sales pitch on either end is brief.

If the caveats deter you in any way from setting aside 43 minutes to watch, here are a few incentives to counteract them:

Peter Kenworthy, the executive director for Mountainfilm in Telluride, is in Chile right now for the International Rural Film Festival, which is part of a larger nonprofit, Fundacion Altiplano, that aims to support and sustain the culture and economies of small Andean communities in the northernmost parts of Chile. He shares the following from his adventures:

2012 marks the third year since we launched our Mountainfilm Commitment Grant program. Our goal is to help creative individuals tell stories that represent the spirit of Mountainfilm in Telluride. We’ve watched the number of applicants grow each year and been impressed by both the quality and diversity of the proposals. This year, the five grantees are working on films that range in subject from climbing to gold mining:

2012 Mountainfilm Commitment Grant Winners

During the Stone Age, Homo habilis apparently created and used tools. It could be argued that this was the beginning of man’s affinity for stuff. Tools were, and are, valuable and worth carting around from place to place. Speaking of carting, it’s stuff that was the impetus behind the invention of the wheel in the late Neolithic era. Wheels were used to make pottery — ahem, more stuff — and to build horse-driven chariots to carry stuff.

While tools and wheels are pretty fundamental items, many of the things we purchase today are not as necessary. At Mountainfilm in Telluride 2012, we showed Living Tiny, a film about downsizing living spaces. In it, one character says, “ People like having lots of stuff, Americans in particular. Ultimately, you can only occupy 12 square feet of space at a time. Everything else is just a place to keep your stuff.”

On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. One hundred fifty years later — as attendees at Mountainfilm in Telluride know —there are actually more people enslaved than during the Civil War.

Author and abolitionist Ben Skinner first educated festival audiences on the issue of modern-day slavery when he spoke about his book, A Crime So Monstrous, at Mountainfilm 2008. The issue attracted mainstream media after a 2009 episode of “Law and Order”called Chattel (which was inspired by Mountainfilm) and an episode of “Larry King Live.”

Andrew Dobson, an ecologist at Princeton, asks a poignant question in a recent New York Times article on elephant poaching in Africa. The question is: “Do you want your children to grow up in a world without elephants?”

Whether it’s armed Congolese, Ugandan and Sudanese soldiers, or poor Tanzanian villagers who poison pumpkins to kill elephants, an unprecedented poaching epidemic is prevalent throughout Africa. The vicious killings are mostly driven by a growing Chinese middle class and their intense desire for ivory, which now sells for $1,000 per pound in Beijing.