Sustainability Film Series

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Capturing The Flag is an urgent cautionary tale and close-up look of American democracy at its most vulnerable point - the ballot box. Through the intimate experiences of the film’s citizen volunteers we are inspired to vote, to help someone else to vote, and to get involved in the growing non-partisan efforts to protect our fragile democracy. The shocking voter suppression we see unfold in real time in 

Capturing The Flag is proliferating across the country, as those who control local elections have been emboldened to rewrite access to the ballot box along partisan lines. With verité footage of Barack Obama and Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the film is also a powerful call to arms for what we all can and need to do in the ongoing battle for voting rights.

Capturing The Flag begins in the fall of 2016 as three old friends - Laverne, Steve and Claire – travel from New York to North Carolina to do voter protection work at the polls. Laverne and Steve have been volunteering their time and resources in this way since 2008, but this is Claire’s first election as a U.S. Citizen after immigrating from South Africa 18 years ago.  In North Carolina, they are joined by a fourth friend, Trista, who was inspired to volunteer at the last moment.  We spend the days before Election Day in Cumberland County, fully embedded with our team as they work to protect voters in the first presidential election since the 2013 dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Through their eyes and efforts -- and the hundreds of voters they try to assist -- the human dimension of democracy comes into focus. Their intimate journeys as citizens of conscience uncover stories about the strength and fragility of American democracy that are rarely heard. 

Dealing with themes that are constantly sensationalized and manipulated in the media -- Left vs. Right, North vs. South, Black vs. White -- Capturing The Flag offers instead deeply personal, often surprising perspectives on the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath. 

Tickets will be available for purchase starting April 7.

Into the Canyon documents the 2016 journey of filmmaker/photographer Pete McBride and writer Kevin Fedarko during their 750-mile journey on foot through the entire length of the Grand Canyon. From the outset, the challenge was far more than they bargained for. More people have stood on the moon than have completed a continuous through hike of the Canyon. McBride and Fedarko took a sectional approach, achieving a feat that many adventurers have taken decades to complete. Others have lost their lives trying. But their quest was more than just an endurance test – it was also a way to draw attention to the unprecedented threats facing one of our most revered landscapes.

Throughout their passage, McBride and Fedarko encountered an astonishingly diverse and powerful landscape, rich in history, that is now facing perhaps the gravest crisis in the 98-year history of the Grand Canyon National Park.

Directed by Pete McBride and produced by the award-winning team at Insignia Films, Into the Canyon is a story of extreme physical hardship that stretches the bonds of friendship and a meditation on the timeless beauty of this sacred place. It is an urgent warning about the environmental dangers that are placing one of America’s greatest monuments in peril and a cautionary tale for our complex relationship with the natural world.

Amá is a feature length documentary which tells an important and untold story: the abuses committed against Native American women by the United States Government during the 1960’s and 70’s: removed from their families and sent to boarding schools, forced relocation away from their traditional lands and involuntary sterilization.

The result of nine years painstaking and sensitive work by filmmaker Lorna Tucker, the film features the testimony of many Native Americans, including three remarkable women who tell their stories - Jean Whitehorse, Yvonne Swan and Charon Aseytoyer - as well as a revealing and rare interview with Dr. Reimart Ravenholt whose population control ideas were the framework for some of the government policies directed at Native American women.

It is estimated over a twenty-year period between 1960 and 1980 that tens of thousands of Native American women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent. Due to poor record keeping during this era the number may in fact be much higher. Many of these women went to their graves having suffered this incredible abuse of power.

The film ends with a call to action – to back a campaign to get a formal apology from the American government, which would then open the door for the women to bring forth a lawsuit. This call to action will be supported by an online petition on the film’s website.

Amá was co-produced by Raindog Films, a London-based production company helmed by Academy-award winning actor Colin Firth and prolific film producer Ged Doherty, and the Roddick Foundation.

My Country No More addresses the struggle of a community's efforts to preserve its way of life.

Between 2011 and 2016, drilling for oil in America reached an unprecedented peak, setting off a modern day gold rush in one of the most rural communities in the country: Trenton, North Dakota. Kalie Rider and her older brother Jed are both striving to rebuild farming in their family, having suffered the foreclosure of their parents' farm during the traumatic 1980s farm crisis.

When their uncle Roger makes a decision to sell a piece of his land, it sets off a domino effect of industrialization in Trenton. Now, with the church being eyed for a diesel refinery, the community becomes riven by competing interests. While Jed faces the possibility of having to uproot his young family and move away, Kalie learns to organize and resist.

Through its lyrical core, the film challenges the notion of "progress" as it questions the long term human consequences of short term approaches to land use, decisions that ultimately affect all Americans, rural and urban alike.

The Vow from Hiroshima is an intimate portrait of Setsuko Thurlow, a passionate, 85-year-old survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Her moving story is told through the lens of her growing friendship with a second generation survivor, Mitchie Takeuchi.

Setsuko was miraculously pulled out of a fiery building after the bomb was dropped and unable to save her other 27 classmates who were burned to death alive. That experience shaped her life forever and she endeavored to keep a pledge she made to her friends - that no one should ever again experience the same horrible fate.

The film is a timely exploration of the global dangers of nuclear weapons and provides an insider's perspective as we see Setsuko campaign with ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons). The culmination of Setsuko's decades of activism is her acceptance speech at the 2017 Nobel Peace Awards.

2020 was the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.