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Friday 8th April, 8pm, Butler House, Patrick St., Kilkenny
We are very happy to welcome Nicole Foss back to Kilkenny for a second visit to deliver her infamous presentation “A Century of Challenges”. Her insights broaden our understanding of how Ireland’s ongoing financial crisis is not just a singular event to be overcome but part of a much bigger global picture which is all too often overlooked by the mainstream media.
Nicole has a background in Energy and Finance and predicts that declining fossil energy supplies and a resumption of the credit crunch will push the global economy into a second great depression. Writing under the pen-name ‘Stoneleigh’, Nicole manages the popular financial blog – The Automatic Earth. She lectures widely on these issues throughout the world on how individuals and communities can prepare and ride-out what could be difficult times ahead.
You can find directions to Butler House here.
The Green Screen kicks off again this spring with 4 excellent films for your viewing pleasure. The screenings will take place again in The Hole in the Wall – a beautiful historic building off high street complete with a wine bar downstairs! and also at Billy Byrnes’s very wonderful movie lounge, John St (March 24th only) The season kicks off with The Vanishing of the Bees on Thursday 10th March.
The Vanishing of the Bees
Thursday 10th March, 8pm
Honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing across the planet, literally vanishing from their hives. Known as Colony Collapse Disorder, this phenomenon has brought beekeepers to crisis in an industry responsible for producing apples, broccoli, watermelon, onions, cherries and a hundred other fruits and vegetables. Commercial honeybee operations pollinate crops that make up one out of every three bites of food on our tables.
Vanishing of the Bees follows commercial beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendes as they strive to keep their bees healthy and fulfill pollination contracts across the U.S. The film explores the struggles they face as the two friends plead their case on Capital Hill and travel across the Pacific Ocean in the quest to protect their honeybees.
Filming across the US, in Europe, Australia and Asia, this documentary examines the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it holds about the relationship between mankind and mother earth. As scientists puzzle over the cause, organic beekeepers indicate alternative reasons for this tragic loss. Conflicting options abound and after years of research, a definitive answer has not been found to this harrowing mystery.
watch the trailer here
The Economics of Happiness
Thursday 24th March, 8pm
Billy Byrne’s , John St
In The Economics of Happiness film-maker Helena Norberg-Hodge takes her experiences of traditional Ladaki culture and the impact of modernisation to show how re-localisation and the strengthening of communities are powerful strategies to help repair our fractured world – our ecosystems, our societies and our selves.
“Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.
The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, an unholy alliance of governments and big business continues to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people all over the world are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.”
A breathtaking followup to her previous film and book – Ancient Futures.
watch the trailer here
Please Note change from regular venue to Billy Byrne’s, John St. for this screening
Food Inc
Thursday 14th April, 8pm
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
watch the trailer here
Our fourth movie has yet to be decided, check back soon
We have shown many films about Peak Oil and the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels throughout our Green Screen series. However, these films have largely focused on the impacts on communities and environments abroad in distant countries. The Pipe brings the issue home with the compelling and tragic story of how the Corrib Gas Pipeline controversy has divided an Irish community and threatened the livelihoods of many who live there.
“In a remote corner of the West of Ireland sits Broadhaven Bay. It is the perfect picture postcard, where the high cliffs of Erris Head and the Stags of Broadhaven stand sentry at the mouth of the bay against the mighty Atlantic, as if protecting the delicate golden sands of Glengad beach and the tiny village of Rossport, which nestles behind the dunes. However, this peaceful tranquility belies the turmoil that lies beneath, and the unique nature of the coastline which has sustained generations of farmers and fishermen, has also delivered to Shell Oil the perfect landfall for the Corrib Gas Pipeline.
In the most dramatic clash of cultures in modern Ireland, the rights of farmers over their fields, and of fishermen to their fishing grounds, has come in direct conflict with one of the worlds most powerful oil companies. When the citizens look to their state to protect their rights, they find that the state has put Shell’s right to lay a pipeline over their own.
The Pipe is a story of a community tragically divided, and how they deal with a pipe that could bring economic prosperity or destruction of a way of life shared for generations.”
The Pipe will be screened as part of the Kilkenny Film Club Winter season
at The Set, John St
Tuesday 11th April 8pm
watch the trailer here
Tuesday, 1st February 2011| 19:00 |Boole 4, Main Campus UCC. Cork
Wednesday, 2nd February 2011 | 19:30 | €5 on the door | Sugar Club, Lower Lesson Street, Dublin 2
We are delighted to welcome Helena Norberg-Hodge to Ireland for the first two Irish screenings of her new film – The Economics of Happiness. Helena is noted for her wonderful book and documentary film “Ancient Futures“.
Each screening will be followed with a panel discussion with well known activists in the area of sustainability and re-localisation. These include Richard Corrigan (RTE), Professor Peadar Kirby and Thomas Riedmuller (Hollies centre) after the Cork screening and Richard Douthwaite (FEASTA), Mick Kelly (GIY), Suzie Cahn (Carraig Dulra) after the Dublin screening.
With the Media narrowly focused on our economic woes for the past few weeks here are a couple of recent YouTube gems that broaden the picture. The ongoing recession in Ireland is not an isolated event but one of the many emergent outcomes of an industrial society hitting the limits to growth.
First off Richard Heinberg condenses the past 200 years of fossil fuel powered global economic growth into an entertaining animation with profound questions about how we might organise ourselves for a long period of economic contraction.
As climate negotiators this week in Cancun in Mexico try to rescue anything face-saving from the ashes of Copenhagen (read Monbiot and Albert Bates coverage), and as the planet continues to heat up regardless, a simple idea called Cap & Share – which would simultaneously control emissions and boost equality – has been gaining attention. In this short spoof the Cap and Share proposal is made simple by 007.
Finally the first part of an indepth condensed version of Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” which brings together the economy, energy and the environment into a powerful presentation that leaves the viewer in no doubt that our civilisation is at a significant turning point with both dangers and opportunities ahead.