ROB STEWART CONSERVATION AWARD
NOMINEES 2020
barefoot: the mark baumer story
DIRECTOR: JULIE SOKOLOW
BAREFOOT is a portrait of Mark Baumer, a writer and activist who walked barefoot for over 100 days to protest climate change. In a voice The New Yorker praised as “reminiscent of Andy Kaufman”, Baumer narrates his walk in self-recorded videos, sharing his offbeat take on life and how we all can make a difference.
A BROKEN EARTH
DIRECTOR: JAMES MUIR
All over the world Fossil Fuel industries have undermined communities and severely impacted the health of people and the planet. In Taranaki, New Zealand the hunt is on for easy oil and gas. The benign rural pastures that surround the base of Mt Taranaki, where people have carved out a quiet living, are riddled with the scars of Fossil Fuel extraction. Sarah Roberts and David Morrison are environmental award winning farmers who have worked the land for generations. When an oil company moves in next door to their family farm, they are forced to deal with the effects of uncontrolled fracking and oil drilling along their quiet country road. .
EYES IN THE FOREST
DIRECTOR: RYAN FFRENCH
The Amazon was the first victim of the peace process in Colombia.
“Eyes in the Forest” follows an expedition into these contested territories with Angélica Diaz-Pulido, a camera trap expert from Instituto Humboldt and Jorge Ahumada, Director of Wildlife Insights, a revolutionary new platform for analyzing camera trap data. Angélica and the Wildlife Insights team are racing against the dark forces behind Colombia’s deforestation to understand and protect the country’s incredible biodiversity— before it is too late.
SOCKEYE SALMON, RED FISH
DIRECTOR: DMITRIY SHPILENOK & VLADISLAV GRISHIN
Sockeye, a species of wild salmon, is born in Kamchatkan waters and spends its entire life in the Pacific Ocean. Only once does it return to fresh waters - to give offspring, start the circle of life, and die. It is an inexhaustible resource that feeds billions of people on the planet, restored every year! But soon, we may find ourselves facing the unimaginable: humans will exhaust the inexhaustible!
WHEN THE RIVER RUNS DRY
DIRECTOR: RORY MCLEOD
In January 2019 viral videos showed grown men near Menindee weeping as they held Murray Cod many decades old that had perished in the green oxygen starved soup that is all that remained of the Darling River. Australians were horrified by the news that the Darling River, known as the Barka to its people, was in a state of ecological collapse. Politicians blamed drought. Ecologists and water management experts placed the blame firmly on the over allocation and over extraction of water – sometimes illegal – by cotton growers upstream. But who is to blame? And what can be done?.