Showing Today
3:00 pm: William and the Windmill
3:30 pm: Killer Whales: Beneath the Surface
5:00 pm: Chattahoochee Unplugged
5:15 pm: Snows of the Nile and Black Mamba- Kiss of Death
7:00 pm: DamNation
7:15 pm: Touching the Wild and She Wolf
8:45 pm: Encounters at the End of the World
Events
Welcome Session: 9:30 am – 11am
Adventures in Science – with Greg Trenish 10-11 am
Animal Corridors – John Davis, trekker and scout at TrekWest leads this informative discussion. 11:00 am-12:00 pm
Positive outcomes – Panelist discuss real world strategies and successful outreach initiatives. 1-3pm
Touching The Wild – a conversation on Animal Handling with Dave Mizejewski – 3:00 – 4:30
Cocktails & Tour – Montgomery Distillery 6:30pm
About the Films
William and the Windmill
Ben Nabors, 2013, USA/Malawi/South Africa, 88 min.
William Kamkwamba, a young Malawian, builds a power-generating windmill from junk parts to rescue his family from famine, transforming his life and catapulting him on to the the world stage. His fame and success lead him to new opportunities and complex choices about his future, distancing him from the life he once knew.
Killer Whales: Beneath the Surface
UK, 2013, 55 min.
The killer whale was long feared as a sea monster until, in May 1964, one was brought into captivity for the first time. This spawned a journey of discovery into the killer whale’s true nature. It quickly became clear, these were not mindless killers – they were, in fact, highly intelligent social creatures. Today, our understanding is deepening still further and the latest revelations are among the most sensational – not only will these top predators ‘adopt’ and care for injured and abandoned orphans, but it seems there’s no longer just the ‘killer whale’.
Chattahoochee Unplugged
Rhett Turner, 2014, USA, 56 min
Chattahoochee Unplugged’ is about the removal of two dams the Eagle Phenix dam and the City Mills Dams in Columbus, Georgia. The program shows the behind the scenes of these two dams being removed and in its place put in a world class white water course. The white water course was designed by the same designer who designed the Ocoee Olympic Course for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The show also goes into detail about why Columbus because it is a fall line river at this point on the Chattahoochee River and gives a brief history of the city. The show contaminates with an incredible white water rafting and kayaking shots.
Snows of the Nile
Nathan Dappen, Neil Losin, USA, 20 min.
Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains rise 5000 meters from the heart of Africa. At their summits are some of Earth’s only equatorial glaciers. But these ‘Mountains of the Moon,’ whose existence caused a sensation in Europe when they were first climbed in 1906, are changing fast. Snows of the Nile follows two scientist/photographers on an ambitious expedition to re-capture historical glacier imagery from the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda. If they could retrace the steps of the Duke of Abruzzi’s legendary 1906 expedition and re-capture the famous glacier photographs taken by Vittorio Sella, they could visualize the impacts of a century of climate change.
Black Mamba- Kiss of Death
2013, South Africa, 46 min
It is Silly Season in Mamba Valley and like zombies from their graves, the heat draws Black Mambas from the shadows. They are on the hunt for summer lodgings but as the deadliest snake on the planet, they are not popular neighbors. Many will fall foul to a gunshot or the sharp end of a shovel. But some will be lucky enough to be rescued by a snake wrangling team with a passion for Mambas. One snake has a special mission, she is recently mated and ready to deliver a new generation of silver killers into Mamba Valley. She is the deadliest snake in Africa.
DamNation
Travis Rummel & Ben Knight, 2014, 87 min.
This powerful film odyssey across America explores the sea change in our national attitude from pride in big dams as engineering wonders to the growing awareness that our own future is bound to the life and health of our rivers. Dam removal has moved beyond the Monkey Wrench Gang. When obsolete dams come down, rivers bound back to life, giving salmon and other wild fish the right of return to primeval spawning grounds, after decades without access. “DamNation”’s majestic cinematography and unexpected discoveries move us through rivers and landscapes altered by dams, but also through a metamorphosis in values, from conquest of the natural world to knowing ourselves as part of nature.
Touching the Wild
David Allen, USA 55 min.
Joe Hutto’s idea of research is anything but normal, dedicating seven years of his life to becoming a wild mule deer. Incredibly, these keenly intelligent animals come to regard this stranger as one of their own. Accepted by the matriarch, he walks among them and can lie with a pregnant doe talking to its unborn fawns. As he crosses the species divide Joe is tapping into a new understanding about these elusive animals. The captivating joy he feels for his new family is nothing short of infectious, but this human predator also learns to see the world from the point of view of prey – sharing their world so personally finally takes a toll that sends him back to his own kind. Produced by Nature/WNET.
She Wolf
Bob Landis, USA, 2014, 50 min.
The Lamar Canyon pack is one of the most famous of all Yellowstone’s wolf packs for one unusual reason: its leader was an especially powerful female, “’06″/832F (aka “The ’06 Female”). Filmmaker Bob Landis retraces the life of this incredible animal, the She Wolf, who was forced to leave her original clan and strike out on her own when she was still a young cub, confronting Yellowstone’s beautiful but merciless wilderness alone.
Encounters at The End of the World
Werner Herzog, 2008, Germany/Antarctica, 99 min.
In the most hostile, barren, alien environment on the planet – you meet the most interesting people. Welcome to Antarctica – like you’ve never experienced it. You’ve seen the extraordinary marine life, the retreating glaciers and, of course, the penguins, but leave it to award-winning, iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog, to be the first to explore the South Pole’s most fascinating inhabitants…humans. In this one-of-kind documentary, Herzog turns his camera on a group of remarkable individuals, “professional dreamers” who work, play and struggle to survive in a harsh landscape of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty – perhaps the last frontier on earth.