Gorgeous Sockeye Salmon: Red Fish looks at the impact of poaching in Kamchatka, a nature-reserve “paradise” in Russia’s far east that supplies much of the world’s salmon and caviar. ![]() ![]() The Long Coast provides a lovely appreciation of fishing and related industries in Maine, where traditional “wild-caught” ways may soon be forced into making way for high-tech factory farming. It’s one of several films that examine the impact of environmental change and commercial pressure on edible aquatic life. The issue that just might drive us there-climate change-is central to several other features, including Centerpiece selection Entangled. Livable Planet’s closing night film on May 2 transcends this Earthly plane: Red Heaven chronicles a year-long NASA experimental program to test conditions that would be endured by astronauts on a mission to Mars. This is the result of policies that have relentlessly drained its resources for offshore gain while providing little in return for residents, who have emigrated in waves to the mainland to survive for many decades. It’s noted that the politically hobbled Commonwealth was already $72 billion in debt before Maria hit. Impressionistic rather than explanatory, Landfall seldom spells out the complex set of issues still afflicting an island long beset by “the colonial disease.” But it still makes a powerful statement, alternately damning and resistant, lyrical and mournful. (as an “unincorporated territory”), it is still considered a poor stepchild-fit for exploitation, but not true support. All this underlined that despite PR being part of the U.S. As one person here says, “What happened was a disaster…but the real disaster is what happened afterward.” Severe immediate shortages in food, water, electricity, gas and so forth were addressed in stupefyingly slow fashion while less than 100 people may have died during the actual Category 5 storm, as many as 5000 are thought to have died subsequently, as a direct or indirect result of government inaction. ![]() “Kids in cages” aside, probably no pre-COVID failure exposed the mercenary callousness of the Trump administration so plainly as its response (or lack thereof) to Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017. The official opening selection this Thu/22 is Cecilia Aldarondo’s Landfall.
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