May 05, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Portland, OR – May 5, 2010
World premiere of new documentary by local filmmaker
scheduled for June 22, 2010, at the Bagdad Theater
Almost every time we use energy, we burn carbon. Every time we burn carbon, we heat up the atmosphere. It’s a dirty fact that global warming cannot be stopped as long as fossil fuels run our planet.
We can fix this. Over three years in the making, “Deep Green” is the first major documentary devoted exclusively to showing us how. Accompanied by an international team of National Geographic and award-winning cinematographers, Portland filmmaker Matt Briggs takes us on a compelling journey through nine countries, including China, to uncover the best people with the best ideas, cutting-edge technologies and restorative solutions to get the job done – if we start now.
On Tuesday, June 22, 2010, the public is invited to join Briggs, the production team, and local green leaders and dignitaries at the world premiere of “Deep Green” at 7 pm at the Bagdad Theater in the heart of the Hawthorne District. Included in the program will be the two eye-popping new animated shorts, “The Krill is Gone” and “Trees,” from Portland’s award-winning Bent Image Lab and voiced by the renowned Tom Kenny. The festivities will begin at 6 pm with a live performance by legendary jazz pianist Randy Porter, who composed the “Deep Green” score. All three films will screen in stunning HD BluRay. For more information, call (503) 635-4469.
Based on six years of intensive research, “Deep Green” goes beyond the politics of climate change to shed new light on the best solutions worldwide in energy efficiency, green building, de-carbonizing transportation, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and smart grids, and forest restoration. Some are profoundly simple and practical—like what one person can do to lower the carbon load in their own home, with their 0wn lifestyle, on their own land. Others are necessarily complex, such as Project DESERTEC— a super-sized smart grid to supply diverse renewable energies to all of Europe and North Africa.
Along the way, we visit with over a dozen legendary visionaries – including bestselling authors Lester Brown and Michael Pollan; scientists Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Dr. David Suzuki; former CIA Director James Woolsey; Edward Kjaer, the Director of Electric Transportation for Southern California Edison; the Natural Resources Council’s China Program Director Barbara Finamore; and green tech leaders in China.
“Deep Green” also features many of Oregon’s own recognized green leaders: Kyle Andersen, GBD Architects; Kathy Bash, DMS Architects; Shane Endicott, The Rebuilding Center; Andy Frichtl, Interface Engineering; Elliot Mainzer, Bonneville Power Administration; R. Peter Wilcox, Renewable Associates; Dennis Wilde, Gerding Edlen Development; Dr. Susan Wolff, Columbia Gorge Community College; City Commissioner Dan Saltzman; Congressman Greg Walden; and former Governor John Kitzhaber.
Briggs’ intense interest in man-made global warming began long before “Deep Green” was conceived. A pioneer of the wild mushroom industry in the U.S., in 1981, the University of Oregon graduate has spent much of his time roaming the national forests between the Rockies and Pacific Ocean in search of elusive fresh fungi. By the 1990s, he says, the encroaching effects of climate change were undeniable.
In 1999, he attended the first of ten Bioneers conferences, and subsequently became active in politics. While working with the members of one national campaign in 2005, Briggs lamented that the candidate didn’t know enough about environmental issues. So he offered to write a summary of the latest information that could help make good policy. “I figured it would take a couple of weeks to draft,” he recounts with a laugh. “It stretched to over a year.” One book led to another, and before he knew it, Briggs had read some 400 tomes, thousands of articles, and attended over two dozen conferences.
At home, Briggs set out to reduce his own carbon footprint. He moth-balled his SUV for a high mileage hybrid car, and gave his mid-century home the first of three major energy-efficient makeovers. The house was subsequently filmed by a local video crew for Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concert event in 2007. It was while watching the 32 animations commissioned for the broadcast that Briggs had the epiphany that would eventually lead him to write, direct, produce and finance “Deep Green.” “I thought, what a fantastic teaching tool. I decided to make a short film about what one person can do to live lighter on the planet,” he says, adding with a laugh: “It started as a weekend shoot.”
Through his brother, a veteran actor living in Los Angeles, Briggs made contact with a History Channel producer, who advised him to recruit the best skilled talent he could afford. So Briggs began assembling a production team that included Portland-based DPs Jeff Streich, an Emmy-winning veteran National Geographic shooter since 1992, and Carey Weatherford, the recipient of the prestigious George Foster Peabody and Dupont Columbia Awards as a former staff cameraman for CBS News and “60 Minutes.” Within six months, it had expanded to include China-based cinematographer Andrew Clark, who shoots regularly for National Geographic Channel, BBC, and CNN; BBC producers Frankie Fathers in Bejing and Jasmine Dick in Europe; as well as CNN Producer of the Year Ariane Riemers in Germany.
When the initial shoot stretched into a week, “the idea expanded to a green building TV special. So we went to Green Build Chicago, which is the gathering of the tribes of anybody who does green building. We also shot the green building tour of houses in Portland. We shot lots of different builders here who are pretty talented and famous. Then several were invited to go to China to teach them how to do this. So I thought, gee, we should go and film that.”When they couldn’t get visas in time, Briggs hired Andrew Clark and Frankie Fathers in Beijing to facilitate the filming, including access to the country’s rapidly-expanding green initiatives and the people behind them. Briggs and two film crews then spent a full month conducting interviews and touring facilities, many of which had never been shot before.
“If you’re going to make a film about environmental solutions, you’ve got to go to China. The old saw is: ‘So goes China, so goes the world’ as far as the environment. What we found is even with all these people consuming all this stuff, there are people working on solutions in just as big a way, and that’s the surprise. Most of the things we were talking about over here in the States – green building, energy efficiency, electrification of transportation, mass transit, cleaning up of coal plants, shutting down of old dirty coal plants, recycling water – they were already doing.” The new saw is: ‘So goes China and the United States, so goes global warming.’ Comparing and challenging both China and the United States to restorative action became central to “Deep Green.”
Following Briggs’ departure, Andrew Clark continued to shoot new developments in the country’s emerging green movement over another five months. Meanwhile, back in the states, Briggs and a crew travelled to more than a dozen green hotspots in the U.S. for interviews and behind-the-scenes tours of breakthrough technologies. Andrew Clark also supervised filming throughout Europe.
When “Deep Green” began principal photography in July 2007, Briggs notes, “many of the solutions had not been discovered. The science and the literature caught up during the course of making ‘Deep Green’.” As a result, there were times when Clark and Fathers would be directed to find examples of certain applications, which Briggs had only heard about but Westerners had never seen. To give “Deep Green” the look and depth of field of 35mm film, the film was shot almost entirely with a state-of-the-art digital Sony 900R HD camera system at the speed of 24p.
Official website: www.DeepGreenMovie.comMEDIA CONTACT:
Lyla Foggia
Foggia Public Relations LLC
(503) 622-0232
lyla@foggiapr.com
www.foggiapr.com
