Green awareness hits the silver screen! The Silverlake Film Festival featured not 1, not 2, but SIX documentaries with a green theme :) Yey for indie filmmaking!

So Summer and I went to see a couple green documentaries and a green panel discussion at the ArcLight Cinemas last night. Snappy reviews of the films:

Building Green — We saw the first episode of a home improvement series where host and co-Director/Writer/Producer Kevin Contreras (above) takes us through the process of building his green house. A cool concept — though both Summer and I were a lil peeved by the way Kevin’s spouse was portrayed as the not-so-smart wifey Kevin had to “check in” with…

Greener Buildings / Bluer Skies — A documentary, narrated by Ted Danson and featuring an interview with Robert Redford, showing how the SoCal HQ for the Natural Resource Defense Council came to be the greenest building in the world, with platimum LEED certification. Interestingly, the film was funded by Southern California Edison.

What was really fascinating was the panel after the films, moderated by LA City Council President Eric Garcetti. Did you know that waterless urinals are a hot issue of contention in SoCal? Both Peter Barsuk, a member of the US Green Building Council, and Bernadette Del Chiaro director of Environment California’s Clean Energy Program, weighed in on this sexy topic :)

Jennifer Wolch, Dean of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities, gave us a macro-perspective on whether or not LA could become a green city (It’s not, but it could be), and Jim Jackson, director/writer/producer of Greener Buildings / Bluer Skies, talked about how film could be used as a medium to catalyze green activism.

Other green films at the festival are Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action, Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea, Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon, and In the Footprint of the City.

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