Santa Monica College’s first Earth Day Film Festival will run Friday from 6 to 10 p.m. and Saturday from 3 to 10 p.m.
Author Adeline Peter Raboff who appears in Oil on Ice, which links the fate of the Artic Wildlife Refuge to U.S. energy policy and recently won Best Documentary Short at the International Documentary Awards, will take part in a discussion following the screening.
Other films dealing with energy that will be shown are The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror, which will be discussed by filmmakers Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy, Global Warming, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, and two light-hearted shorts, The Veggie Van Voyage by Joshua Tickell and SUV Taggers by Judith Vogelsang.
Two films by SMC professors are scheduled: English professor Dana Morgan’s Wordsworth Country, and adjunct cinema professor Sheila Laffey’s The Last Stand, Heroes at Ballona Wetlands. Actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr., who appears in Laffey’s film, will speak before and after its screening.
Venice filmmaker Ziri Rideaux will show her award-winning Treewoman, about Julia Butterfly Hill, the young woman who lived in an ancient redwood tree for two years, and producers Geoffrey Holland and Greg Molina will talk about Cost of Cool, which addresses ways in which young people can be cool without being materialists.
The festival will end with The Corporation, which looks at the shaping role of corporations in contemporary America.
The series was coordinated by Laffey and Morgan, and is sponsored by the SMC Communications Department with the SMC Center for Environmental and Urban Studies, English Department, EcoAction Club and Film Club, with funding assistance from the SMC Associates, a private organization that funds speakers and special programs at the college.
The event, in Room 214 in the Art Cimplex at SMC, is free, but seating is limited.For screening times, call 434-8278 or go to: http://www.smc.edu/comm/EarthDayFilmFestival.
