2024 Watershed Alliance Environmental Film Series

This up-to-the-minute tale of geopolitical, scientific, and corporate intrigue exposes the machinations of a secretive organization empowered to green light the massive extraction of metals from the deep seafloor that are essential to the electric battery revolution.

Deep Rising illuminates the vital relationship between the deep ocean and sustaining life on Earth. The documentary also follows the mining startup, "The Metals Company" as it pursues funding, public favor and permission from the International Seabed Authority to mine wide swathes of the Pacific Ocean floor.

Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, make men fight for gender equality and end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real.

This documentary weaves together the most urgent themes of our times--climate change, gender and racial inequality, the gaps between the rich and the poor and the ideas that groups around the world have generated in order to save the planet.

Once a Braided River, a new documentary by Barbara Bernstein, tells the story of how the North Reach of the Willamette River was transformed from a braided river, rich in biodiversity and home to many bands of indigenous people, into an industrial sacrifice zone with a ten-mile-long superfund site running from downtown Portland to the river's confluence with the Columbia River. The documentary focuses on the part of Portland that most Portlanders don't know about or ignore. It braids together the strands of many issues that face us – climate chaos, rivers contaminated with toxic pollutants, fish and wildlife brought to the brink of extinction by these perilous practices and the dire hazards of storing immense amounts of explosive fossil fuels upon liquefaction zones underlain by major fault lines along the shoreline of the river that runs through our region. The documentary features community groups and activists working to replace the current industrial sacrifice zone with a green working waterfront defined by good jobs, clean energy and healthy ecosystems.

What started as one man's quixotic dream has turned into reality. For the past three years, the 65-foot schooner, Apollonia, has been delivering goods up and down the Hudson River by sail sans fossil fuels--a throwback to a time when there were 1,200 such boats on the river each day. It turns out buyers prefer the non-polluting, anti-amazon way of making deliveries.

Liberty City, Miami, was home to one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the U.S. Now with rising sea levels, the neighborhood's higher ground has become something else: real estate gold. Wealthy property owners push inland to higher ground, creating a speculators' market in the historically Black neighborhood previously ignored by developers and policymakers alike.

The dramatic changes happening in Miami's Liberty Square are a looking glass for contemporary issues of wide-scale significance: the affordable housing crisis, the impact of systemic racism and climate gentrification. Miami is experiencing sea level rise before the rest of the country. What is happening in Liberty Square is a prescient story of what is to come, and strategies put to the test here are being closely observed by the rest of the world.

Common Ground unveils a dark web of money, power and politics behind our broken food system. The film profiles a hopeful and uplifting movement of white, black, and indigenous farmers who are using alternative regenerative models of agriculture that could balance the climate, save our health and stabilize America's economy--before it's too late.