Gasland
Cinema Nova, 23/11/2010
Status: Behind by 5 and a half films
Josh Fox plays banjo and lives by a creek in the woods in the house his parents built. One day he receives a letter from a multi-national energy company offering him $100,000 to sink wells on his property to tap into the vast natural gas reserve beneath it. Fox decided to go on tour to visit older natural gas well sites (hundreds of thousands of them) to assess the potential impacts of wells on his land. What he found was pretty disturbing. The horribly nasty chemicals used to break apart the rock to release the gas invariably contaminate the ground water. Maybe not such a big deal when there’s only a bit of water on the property, but Fox’s land is in the New York water catchment and provides water to about 9 million people. So it’s kind of a big deal.
Gasland started off a bit like a really good This American Life story – I like the way Fox used first person narrative (emphasized by his amateurish photography) to tell a much bigger and more complicated story. But at the point where a TAL story would pull back to encompass the big picture, the context and the wider implications, Fox focuses in. There is very little sense of the greater story here – why energy companies are pursuing natural gas mining and whether it is actually doing what congress hoped it would (i.e. provide cheaper energy for a lot of people) and whether there are alternative ways to pull it out of the ground – and in the end it felt a little like a “not in my backyard” rant.
But Fox is extremely likeable and the power of his evidence – the personal stories, the footage of congressional hearings and the little investigative journalism he undertakes - is compelling enough.
