Local Environmental Group Celebrates 40th Birthday with Free Film Festival

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Contact: [Shaun Rumbelow, Sheffield Friends of the Earth Spokesperson, 99999 999999 or xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx]

Local Environmental Group Celebrates 40th Birthday with Free Film Festival
Sheffield Friends of the Earth is celebrating 40 years of environmental campaigning by organising a free month long film festival at the University of Sheffield’s Arts Tower from Thursday 8th May.

Members of the public are invited to watch a range of films including “Trashed”, “Gasland2”, “More Than Honey” and “A Fierce Green Fire”. A short video of our 40 year history will be screened before each film.

Sheffield Friends of the Earth’s spokesperson, Shaun Rumbelow, said “We are delighted to invite members of the public to our free film festival to celebrate 40 years of protecting the environment.  With celebrities like Robert Redford, Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep narrating the films we are sure this event will be popular”.

Shaun continued, “At the moment our group is campaigning against fracking in the local region so we are really pleased to be showing Gasland2. It will help the public discover what has happened to people’s lives and the environment where fracking has already taken place”.

A long standing member of the group for over 20 years, Shaun Rumbelow said, “Our own film celebrating 40 years of campaigning looks back at the work we have done to make Sheffield and the world around us a better place, from saving the whales and wild animals to reducing air pollution in Sheffield and providing better recycling facilities.”

The films will be shown on the following dates in the University of Sheffield’s Arts Tower, Lecture Theatre 3. Doors open at 5.30pm for screenings to start at 6pm.
Thu 8 May - Gasland 2
Thu 15 May - Trashed
Thu 22 May - A Fierce Green Fire
Thu 29 May - More Than Honey

More details about the films and the event can be found on the Sheffield Friends of the Earth website. www.sheffieldfoe.co.uk

ENDS
 
Notes for Editors
Gasland 2
In this explosive follow-up to his Oscar-nominated film Gasland, filmmaker Josh Fox uses his trademark dark humour to take a deeper, broader look at the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the controversial method of extracting natural gas and oil, now occurring on a global level (in 32 countries worldwide). Gasland 2, shows how the stakes have been raised on all sides in one of the most important environmental issues facing our nation today. The film argues that the gas industry’s portrayal of natural gas as a clean and safe alternative to oil is a myth and that fracked wells inevitably leak over time, contaminating water and air, hurting families, and endangering the earth’s climate with the potent greenhouse gas, methane. In addition the film looks at how the powerful oil and gas industries are in Fox's words "contaminating our democracy".

Trashed
We buy it, we bury it, we burn it and then we ignore it. Does anyone think about what happens to all the trash we produce? We keep making things that do not break down. We have all heard these horrifying facts before, but with Jeremy Irons as our guide, we discover what happens to the billion or so tons of waste that goes unaccounted for each year. On a boat in the North Pacific he faces the reality of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the effect of plastic waste on marine life. We learn that chlorinated dioxins and other man-made Persistent Organic Pollutants are attracted to the plastic fragments. These are eaten by fish, which absorb the toxins. We then eat the fish, accumulating more poisonous chemicals in our already burdened bodies. Meanwhile, global warming, accelerated by these emissions from landfill and incineration, is melting the ice-caps and releasing decades of these old poisons, which had been stored in the ice, back into the sea. And we learn that some of the solutions are as frightening and toxic as the problem itself.

A Fierce Green Fire
The Battle for a Living Planet is the first big-picture exploration of the environmental movement – grassroots and global activism spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change. Narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep, the film premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2012, has won acclaim at festivals around the world.

More Than Honey
More Than Honey brings sharply into focus our current bee crisis where numerous colonies of bees have been decimated throughout the world with 50% to 90% of bees having disappeared over the past 15 years. With one in three mouthfuls of the food we eat and 80% of plant species dependent on pollination, the honey bee is as indispensable to the economy as it is to man’s survival

PRINTED ARTICLES

Sheffield Star - Wednesday 30 April 2014