Deforestation in the Amazon/First Run Features

Though many of the individual battles have been recorded along the way, there has rarely been an effort to assemble the entire history of the environmental movement in a single body of work, as Kitchell’s film attempts to accomplish.

“I thought the movement, at about the age of 50, needed its big picture history [in order] to give broader perspective and deeper meaning,” the filmmaker tells PLANET.

The initial idea was to create a six-part miniseries that truly would seek to incorporate every last chapter of the story, but that plan was abandoned at the suggestion of the biologist Edward O. Wilson, who served as a consultant for the film. Instead, Kitchell decided upon a feature-length movie centered on five important historical turning points. With the outcome of the final section still yet to be determined, the idea was to provide context around our current struggles as we seek to mitigate climate change. The director also hoped to engage audiences by conveying that environmentalism hasn’t always been about learning to live with defeat.

As a documentarian, Kitchell (Berkeley in the Sixties) recognizes that he has a bent for focusing his lens on social movements. The latest repetition of this tendency comes in response to the challenges facing today’s environmental defenders and the next generation of them, for whom Kitchell wanted to illustrate how bottom-up grassroots movements have managed to overcome firm opposition in the past and ultimately succeed.