The Southern Appalachian Film Festival is going on in Johnson City, TN at East Tennessee State Univ. now and continues through the 23rd of Nov. at PTSCC and The Knoxville Museum of Art. This year’s theme is the environment and includes everything from shorts to documentaries to horror to kid’s films. It should be an interesting festival.
An interesting documentary, Arid Lands, was to be shown but somehow disappeared from the schedule as far as I can tell. But check out their website where you can view the trailer and order the film.
Arid Lands is a documentary feature about the land and people of the Columbia River Basin in southeastern Washington state. Sixty years ago, the Hanford nuclear site produced plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and today the area is the focus of the largest environmental cleanup in history. It is a landscape of incredible contradictions. Coyotes roam among decommissioned nuclear reactors, salmon spawn in the middle of golf courses, wine grapes grow in the sagebrush, and federal cleanup dollars spur rapid urban expansion.
Arid Lands takes us into a world of sports fishermen, tattoo artists, housing developers, ecologists, and radiation scientists living and working in the area. It tells the story of how people changed the landscape over time, and how the landscape affected their lives.
