Showing Today
5:00 pm: Path of the Pronghorn & Hunt for the Super Predator
5:15 pm: Invasion of the Giant Tortoise and Szigetkoz- The Delta of the Danube
7:00 pm: GMO OMG
7:15 pm: Valley of the Sharks
8:30 pm: Grizzly Man
Events
IWFF Registration at The Roxy, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm
Filmmaker’s Welcome Party : 6:00 pm
About the Films
Path of the Pronghorn
Jake Willers, USA, 8 min.
Since 2003, Wildlife Conservation Society conservation scientists have been involved in a long-term study of the Path of the Pronghorn, an age-old migration route that connects summer range in Grand Teton National Park with winter range far to the south in the western Wyoming’s Green River Valley.
Hunt for the Super Predator
Michael Lynch, Smithsonian, Australia, 58 min.
In the depths of Australia’s Southern Ocean a Great White Shark is savagely attacked by a far larger mystery predator. An electronic tracking device attached to its fin records a high speed underwater chase before the shark and its tag are devoured. Two weeks later, after being carried in the belly of the unknown killer, the still functioning tag is excreted and washed ashore, withholding clues that could reveal the identity of the sharks super predator. This is a story of a super predator’s underwater attack that leads investigators to a mysterious natural phenomenon that attracts the ocean’s most fearsome predators.
Invasion of the Giant Tortoise
Theo Lipfert, USA, 27 min.
Invasion of the Giant Tortoises explores the controversial introduction of a non-native species to the African island of Mauritius. Once home to the dodo, Mauritius was teeming with giant tortoises until the arrival of man. The introduction of predators and habitat loss doomed these majestic creatures to extinction. Now biologists have embarked on a radical plan: to replace the extinct Mauritian tortoise with a close relative: the giant tortoise from Aldabra, a deserted atoll near the Seychelles. How will the island’s ecosystem respond? And how do the results of this experiment change how we thing about biodiversity?
Szigetkoz- The Inland Delta of the Danube
Szabolcs Mosonyi, Hungary, 51min
In the Western access areas to Hungary life had speeded up – there are wind-mills, motorways, big cities and industrial parks all over the place. Yet, something is hiding between them. This is an enormous cone-shaped alluvial deposit with tiny villages, forests, and river branches. On one side of this region is today’s Szigetköz.
Flowing out of the Alps and Carpathians the Danube River created this land delta unique in Europe. Arriving at the plain the river broke into wide branches where unparalleled fauna developed. These days the river cannot change its course as freely as it used to in the old days. The decisive change came about some twenty years ago with the diversion of the river and the building of the hydroelectric plant of Gabcikovo. Seeing the grip of the built in surroundings the question is obvious: can the fauna preserve its former abundance?
GMO OMG
Jeremy Seifert, USA, 2013, 90 min
The documentary explores the systematic corporate takeover and potential loss of humanity’s most precious and ancient inheritance: seeds. Director Jeremy Seifert investigates how loss of seed diversity and corresponding laboratory assisted genetic alteration of food affects his young children, the health of our planet, and freedom of choice everywhere. GMO OMG follows one family’s struggle to live and eat without participating in an unhealthy, unjust, and destructive food system. In GMO OMG, the encroaching darkness of unknown health and environmental risks, chemical toxins, and food monopoly meets with the light of a growing global movement to take back what we have lost. Has the global food system been irrevocably hijacked?
Valley of the Sharks
John Ruthven, USA, 57 min.
“In the heart of the Pacific Ocean the sea around the Tuamotu islands is coursing with life. Hundreds of shards cruise though underwater canyons above a seabed carpeted with coral. Scientists often cite the relationship between healthy reefs and top predators, but they don’t really know how it works. Time and again as top predators disappear entire ecosystems below them fail. This film will find out why corals need sharks, just as much as sharks need corals. It uncovers how two of the most threatened groups of animals in the ocean are truly dependent on one another, and therefore must be protected if either of them are to survive into the future.
Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog, 2005, USA, 103 min.
Grizzly Man documents the life and death of amateur grizzly bear expert and wildlife preservationist Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell lived unarmed among the bears for thirteen summers, and filmed his adventures in the wild during his final five seasons. In October 2003, Treadwell’s remains, along with those of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were discovered near their campsite in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve. They had been mauled and devoured by a grizzly, the first known victims of a bear attack in the park. (The bear suspected of the killings was later shot by park officials.) Was Timothy Treadwell a passionate and fearless environmentalist who devoted his life to living peacefully among Alaskan grizzly bears in order to save them? Or was he a deluded misanthrope whose reckless actions resulted in his own death, as well as those of his girlfriend and one of the bears he swore to protect?