program 2006

January 14 and 15, 2006
Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco

Program 1

Cool Water Haven
WORLD PREMIERE
18 min, USA, 2004, Kip Evans
Not only people come to San Francisco for great seafood. Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary is SF’s amazing aquatic “backyard,” an oceanic cornucopia to satisfy even the hungriest — including great white sharks, giant blue whales, and a quarter-million seabirds. — MJS

Goldman Environment Prizewinners
10 min, USA, 1990-05
In spite of death threats, Bruno Van Peteghem of New Caledonia is leading efforts to protect his island’s reefs; working with local communities, Pisit Charnsnoh has initiated projects to restore Thailand’s mangrove forests, devastated by shrimp farming. They exemplify the grassroots activism recognized by the Goldman Environmental Prize, given to six recipients annually since 1990. — SH

Cod Help Us
WORLD PREMIERE
23 min, Canada, 2005, Ezra Soiferman
For years, cod fishing in Quebec’s St. Paul’s River meant being on the water from May to October. It was a life — to some a paradise. What is happening to that life — now that the season lasts two days — is explored with great skill and affection in this moving film. —SH

Hotu Painu (Poison Fruit)
52 min, New Zealand, 1985, Peter Turei (Director) & Douglas Owens (Producer)
Nuclear tests near Rongelap in French Polynesia transform human fetuses into “jellyfish babies,” unleash cancers, and poison the atoll. The U.S. knowingly leaves islanders in harm’s way. Decades later, when Greenpeace tries to evacuate survivors, the French Secret Service bombs the “Rainbow Warrior,” killing a crew member. The shame is unspeakable. —MJS

Program 2

Channel Swimming
WORLD PREMIERE
20 min, USA, 2005, Brian Herrick & Paul Harvey
Swimming solo across the English Channel has always been daunting. And it has never really been a solo venture. The swimmer’s skill and determination are key, but you make it only with the aid of coaches, pilots, cheering supporters — and in this case the help of your Dolphin Club swimming pals. —SH

Lethal Sound: Whales, Sonar & the Rising Threat of Ocean Noise
5 min, USA, 2005, Daniel Hinerfeld
Noise from high intensity sonar and oil exploration is killing dolphins and whales. It explodes eardrums, and causes brain hemorrhage, mass stranding and death. It so deafens and disorients these creatures that they cannot navigate, find food or mates, or rear their young. Ponder this at your next refuel. —MJS

Reefstory
US PREMIERE
20 min, Netherlands, 2005, Edward Snijders
Slow-growing corals are vulnerable to many destructive forces — natural and man-made. But these mothers of reef ecosystems can recover well if given half the chance. The hundreds of coral species — from hard brain coral to soft flowering coral — also possess an astonishing beauty. —SH

Of Penguins and Men (Des Manchots et Des Hommes)
(Prize winner, FIFMEE 2005, Toulon, France)
52 min, France
Luc Jacquet et Jerome Maison

At least once, while marching and belly-flopping to their own drummer, Antarctica’s Emperor Penguins had company. This documentary film follows a production crew during the nine dark months it filmed the remarkable lives of those penguins in their austerely magnificent world. —SH

Program 3

Ivan, The Return of the Stingrays
US PREMIERE
13 min, Spain, 2005, Carlos Virgili
After Hurricane Ivan battered its way over the Grand Cayman Islands in September 2004, several hundred Atlantic sting rays that called the islands home disappeared. Would they come back? They do, and they seem to have missed the divers as much as the divers missed them. —SH

Cristini’s Feat
7 min, USA
When Italian visitor Alberto Cristini swam from Alcatraz while pushing a floating easel and doing a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, would you call it a rococo experience? Perché non? —SH

Beach Food: The Importance of Kelp on the Beach
4 min, USA, 2004
Jessica Waters and Melanie Marquardt
Seaweed washed onto sandy shores aren’t just unsightly tangles of algae. They are feasts for kelp-chomping beachhoppers and other critters, who are themselves food for shorebirds. —MJS

Soulmate
8 min, USA, 2005, Ilja Sarro, Rey Hernandez
Strike out at internet dating? Spinning your wheels at speed dating? Ready to throw in the crying towel? Try tossing a note in a bottle into the Pacific. You never know what the next new wave will bring in. —SH

Mavericks
55 min, USA, 1998, Grant Washburn
Not just another surfer flick, Mavericks documents the evolution of a world-class California surf spot, where 40-foot walls of green-gray water explode over wetsuited kamikazes pushing the limits of endurance, strength and skill. In the annual competition, it’s agreed: “Mavericks always wins.” —MJS

Program 4

Tsunami Rangers
28 min, USA, 2003, Eric Soares
Once you’ve seen this film the term rock garden will no longer suggest a calm zenlike refuge. These ocean kayakers, who call themselves the Tsunami Rangers, love getting rocked and rolled by just about any crashing, roiling wave they can find. And they find plenty. —SH

Samurai Surfers
15 min, USA, 2005. Sachi Cunningham
When the US Army Corps of Engineers dumps trash on a living reef, Puerto Rican surfers adopt the Way of the Warrior, exhibiting Samurai values of courage and justice. They put their bodies in front of bulldozers. They sue the pants off the USACE. —MJS

Taking Back the Waves,
US PREMIERE
76 min, South Africa, 2005, Nicolaas Hofmeyr
South African beaches offer some of the world’s best surfing, but during apartheid, people of color were banned from most of them. Two young men, one white, one mixed race, confront that barrier and make some waves of their own. —SH

Program 5

Reefs: Rainforests of the Ocean
WORLD PREMIERE
min, Canada, 2004, Kat Baulu
Global warming, tsunamis and, el Niño all wreak havoc on slow-growing coral reefs, home to countless marine species. Heavy anchors, pollution and wanton collecting also take their toll. Today, reefs are receiving some much needed care — from Quatar in the Persian Gulf to the Bahamas and Barbados. —SH

Bridging San Francisco Bay
10 min, USA, 1937, produced by US Steel/Jam Handy Organization
In spite of symphonic music and melodramatic narration, no politicians appear in this film. Instead, this black and white documentary captures the dangerous work of the bridgemen who, sometimes step by step on catwalk or steel beam, did the work of building the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. —SH

The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story
55 min, USA, 2005, David L. Brown
An entertaining 55-minute documentary on the wild and troubled history of the new east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Addressing what State Senator Tom McClintock calls “one of the great fiascos of the 20th and 21st centuries in California history,” the documentary finds both the humor and the drama in that story.

Program 6

City of Mermaids
16 min, USA, 2005, Leah Wolchok
In the 1950s on Florida’s west coast, when a young woman graduated from high school, she got married, went to college…or became a Weeki Wachee mermaid. And once a Weeki Wachee mermaid, always a Weeki Wachee mermaid, as a team of forty-something mermaids gracefully prove. —SH

Great Highway: Journey to the Soul of Bay Area Surfing
(Trailer Only), 8 min, USA, 2005, Mark Gunson
In the wintery fogs of San Francisco summers, they walked as teenagers past the “No Swimming” signs and hit the surf at Ocean Beach. Friendships are still going strong from those days, when Jack O’Neill was experimenting with “wet suits” and the shivering surfers huddled around a fire pit. —SH

The Vanishing Ice
US PREMIERE
21 min, Canada, 2005, Rachel Gauk
The accelerated melting rate of the earth’s glaciers puts us between our shrinking “rocks” of ice and a very dry hard place. Privatize the shrinking supply and wallow in the profits? Bury our heads in the planet’s growing expanse of sand? Neither, this sharp-edged film argues. —SH

A Life Among Whales
57 min, France, 2005, Bill Haney and Eric Grunebaum
Pioneer whale biologist Roger Payne recounts his cetacean-loving labors over three decades, from the infancy of whale research to current struggles against whaling, the destruction of critical dolphin and whale habitats, and the demise of species. —MJS

Program 7

Henry Wood Elliott: Defender of the Fur Seal
WORLD PREMIERE
26 min, USA, 2005, Paul B. Hillman
Outstanding documentary on the illustrator-advocate who witnessed the decline of northern fur seal populations in Alaska’s Pribilof Islands to a relict few. Wasteful slaughter by greedy hunters from the US, Russia and Japan were to blame. Elliott pushed through the first wildlife conservation treaty, and saved them from extinction. —MJS

Salt Pond Habitat Restoration
WORLD PREMIERE
7 min, USA, 2005, Judy Irving (Executive Director)
In 2003, tidal gates were opened up at salt ponds in southern and northern San Francisco Bay to let nature take its course. Some 16,000 acres of tidal wetlands were restored to wildness, a priceless gift to future Bay Region inhabitants — feathered, furred, and human. —SH

Devil’s Teeth
Roger Teich, 10 min, USA
Diver Ron Elliot harvests sea urchins at the Farallon Islands, even during white shark season. This haunting film examines his emergence from a substance-tainted past into a life beneath the sea that offers focus and meaning “at the margins of grace and terror.” —MJS

Beach Food: The Importance of Kelp on the Beach
US PREMIERE
Jessica Waters and Melanie Marquardt, 4 min, USA, 2004
Piles of seaweed washed by storms onto sandy shores aren’t just unsightly tangles of algae. They are feasts for kelp-chomping beachhoppers, insects and other critters from which shorebirds and other wildlife take sustenance. —MJS

Another World (Le Troisième Monde)
(Prize winner, FIFMEE 2005, Toulon, France)
52 min, France, 2005, Steve Moreau
Holed up with even a best friend can get on your nerves, often sooner than later. Rowing across the Atlantic with someone who doesn’t speak your language, two hours at the oars and two hours off, day and night, for months, is impossible. This indomitable Frenchman and Englishman prove otherwise. —SH

Our thanks to volunteer reviewers Sidney Hollister (SH) and Mary Jane Schramm (MJS).