Join environmental filmmakers, naturalists, and authors to celebrate nature and become inspired to preserve our natural world.
The Sundance Nature Alliance is proud to present this new guest artist series highlighting the work of environmental storytellers, activists, and adventurers, and the role of art in sparking positive change. From birds to panthers to ancient foods, the North Pole to the American West and beyond, hear directly from intrepid filmmakers and authors who can help us understand our place in a changing world. This series will inspire audience members with multi-media presentations, film screenings, readings and discussions with each artist.
Laura Turner Seydel
Brought to you in partnership with The Redford Center—Sundance Nature Alliance is excited to welcome associate producer Laura Turner Seydel for a screening and discussion of her documentary film Common Ground.
Common Ground is the highly anticipated sequel to the juggernaut success documentary, Kiss the Ground, which touched over 1 billion people globally and inspired the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. By fusing journalistic expose’ with deeply personal stories from those on the front lines of the food movement, Common Ground unveils a dark web of money, power, and politics behind our broken food system. The film reveals how unjust practices forged our current farm system in which farmers of all colors are literally dying to feed us. 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.
Common Ground
April 26, 2024
6:00 PM
Screening Room
Sundance Mountain Resort
Q&A and Reception to Follow
Thank you for attending Voices of Nature’s screening of Common Ground
Please join the solution-driven movement of regenerative leaders as they make their case for soil health across North America and beyond. We can all find our ‘common ground’ to heal the soil, our health, and the planet. No action is too small.
Deep Rising
Brought to you in partnership with the Redford Center—Sundance Nature Alliance is excited to host this special screening of Mattieu Rytz' acclaimed documentary film Deep Rising.
DEEP RISING is a tale of geopolitical, scientific and corporate intrigue: investigating the future of the world's energy crisis and how it is currently tied to the fate of the deep ocean floor, which is intricately tied to our survival.
5 years after Anote’s Ark, Matthieu Rytz returns with this up-to-the-minute tale of geopolitical, scientific, and corporate intrigue that exposes the machinations of a secretive organization empowered to greenlight massive extraction of metals from the deep seafloor that are deemed essential to the electric battery revolution. Narrated by Jason Momoa, Deep Rising illuminates the vital relationship between the deep ocean and sustaining life on Earth. The documentary also follows mining startup The Metals Company, as it pursues funding, public favor, and permission from the International Seabed Authority to mine wide swaths of the Pacific Ocean floor. Rytz’s fly-on-the-wall access observes extraction companies as they co-opt scientific studies and deliver pitches to investors, proposing how the costs of industrializing our Earth’s last pristine environment can be justified to access metals they claim will benefit all of mankind. As oil conglomerates pivot investments to deep-ocean mining, Deep Rising examines humanity’s destructive pattern of extracting materials for profit and asks why we don’t choose, instead, to develop abundant resources to solve our energy problems.
Deep Rising
May 18, 2024
6:00 PM
Screening Room
Sundance Mountain Resort
Melissa L. Sevigny
Join Sundance Nature Alliance as we highlight the first author in our 2024 series, Voices of Nature, and her enlightening book, Brave the Wild River.
BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by science journalist and writer Melissa L. Sevigny, is an evocative and beautifully written chronicle of botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter’s history-making journey through the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1938.
Driven by boundless curiosity and determination, Clover and Jotter set out with an ambitious but relatively inexperienced expedition leader and three amateur boatmen, eager to “botanize” the beautiful and bizarre plant life of this little-known corner of the American West. Subjected to surges of snowmelt, muddy landslides carrying boulders and debris, frothy whirlpools, and perilous waves, the Colorado River was considered the most dangerous river in the world and at the time only a handful of men, and no women, had survived a boat journey through the Grand Canyon.Clover and Jotter’s plant pressings, letters, and journal entries provide an unprecedented botanical map of a landscape then unsullied by colonial influence. Their work was the first formal survey of the otherworldly plant life that thrived in such a “barren and hellish” landscape—tough, fierce, spiny cacti that sprouted in the secret nooks and crannies of the canyon, clinging to sheer cliffs and shifting sandbars. Sevigny’s vibrant and sophisticated style brings the heart pounding drama of the women’s forty-three-day journey down the river and the exquisite natural beauty of the canyon to life. Brave the Wild River is a loving tribute to two remarkable women—who valued their curiosity about the world more than their presumed place in it—and the adventure of a lifetime.
Melissa will speak and share photos relating to her journey of writing Brave the Wild River. Q&A and book signing opportunities to follow.
Brave the Wild River
June 15, 2024
6:00 PM
Screening Room
Sundance Mountain Resort
Q&A and Book Signing to Follow
Leila Philip
An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver—the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future.
From award-winning writer Leila Philip, Beaverland is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, through history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist-high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers.
Beaver Land
October 12, 2024
6:00 PM
Screening Room
Sundance Mountain Resort
Q&A and Book Signing to Follow
Lisa Landers
Brought to you in partnership with The Redford Center—Sundance Nature Alliance is thrilled to welcome producer, director, writer, Lisa Landers for a screening and discussion of her documentary film Giants Rising.
GIANTS RISING tells the epic tale of our relationship with America's iconic redwood forests. Prized for the quality of their wood, some 95% of the primeval redwoods have been logged since the1800s. The losses were dramatic, but so too have been the battles to protect these trees, then and now.
In this film we meet passionate people dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the redwoods and safeguarding their future. They include a scientific detective uncovering the secrets of redwood resilience, members of the Yurok Tribe fighting to restore their cultural connections to these forests, a park manager summoning new life from ravaged timberlands, and a modern-day Ansel Adams who's attempting to display a life-size photograph of a 310 foot redwood— a portrait she hopes will rekindle our connection to these ambassadors from another time.
Through the stories of these redwood devotees and others, we also delve into questions about why we evolved to experience such intense awe in the presence of redwoods, and how spending time in these forests also offers social benefits— like making us more compassionate, generous, and willing to cooperate with each other for the greater good. The goal of GIANTS RISING is not only to celebrate the marvels of redwoods and all they do for us, but to recognize what we can do for them to ensure they continue rising up for generations to come.
Giants Rising
October 26, 2024
6:00 PM
Screening Room
Sundance Mountain Resort
Q&A and Reception to Follow