SYDNEY — The Wild Spaces Environmental Film Festival will be held in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains from November 25-29. Wild Spaces seeks to inform people on crucial environmental issues and offers a platform for discussion about issues that are being ignored by the mainstream media.
Over the last 18 months, the festival has travelled through Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, Byron Bay, Newcastle and Townsville. In Katoomba it will leap out of its "fringe" beginnings and into the mainstream via the state-of-the-art, six-story high maxvision screen "The Edge".
Author and social commentator Richard Neville will open the festival.
"We've screened twice in Sydney and Byron Bay, increasing our audience by almost 100%, said Gary Caganoff, Wild Spaces' national director. "Fifty percent of this year's Sydney audience did not come from inside the environment and social justice movements but from the wider community. The people who come along are people who want to be informed, are fed up with the poor quality information thrown to them by the national television networks."
One film in the line-up is Chelyabinsk: the most contaminated spot on the planet, about a Russian nuclear weapons complex that has had three nuclear disasters and has irradiated half a million people. The documentary, by Emmy Award-winning Polish producer Slawomir Grunberg, has not been broadcast in Australia, though not through lack of trying. ABC and SBS were not interested.
Caganoff said: "The film has been broadcast in Japan, Poland and Holland. Are the ABC and SBS protecting the Australian public by holding back from showing confronting films? I don't understand their rationale. If it has to do with money then the federal government is to blame for budget cutbacks. Whether he is smart to it or not, Howard is committing what David Bradbury described as 'cheque book censorship'."
The festival premiers Bradbury's latest documentaries, Jabiluka and Loggerheads — both to be introduced by him. The films are linked by an invisible thread. Apart from the theme of exploitation of publicly owned natural resources, denying their enjoyment by the majority for the profit of the few, the films are also linked in that they expose the government's refusal to allow input from communities into decisions which affect them.
The films also show that when independent organisations join with bureaucracies for improved environmental and cultural outcomes, they often end up compromising to the point of approving what they set out to stop.
Loggerheads documents the most recent struggle by conservationists in northern NSW to save what remains of our native and old-growth forests in the area. They battled against a government bureaucracy which sprung from an Australia-wide forest conservation movement at the turn of the century. A NSW branch of the Australian Forest League was formed in 1914 to counteract the imminent destruction of NSW forests. Loggerheads asks: "What has been happening in the past 85 years?"
Jabiluka, in the language of the Mirrar Gundjehmi people of the Kakadu region, is so sacred that not even traditional owner and tribal custodian Yvonne Margarula can speak about it. Knowing this, federal environment minister Robert Hill has allowed the Jabiluka uranium mine to proceed without adequate flora and fauna surveys or water flow studies.
Jabiluka will be an underground mine below the flood plain of an area infamous for its big wet season. Energy Resources Australia plan to clear 20 hectares of Kakadu National Park for the mine and 44 hectares for a service road linking Jabiluka to the Ranger mine near Jabiru where the ore will be processed.
ERA's chief executive Philip Shirvington tells Bradbury: "We don't add any radioactivity to what's already there naturally. All we do is we dig up the ore, crush it, extract the uranium out and then we put the ore as tailings back in the pits, the open pits, and when mining is finished that will be dried out, covered with rock and topsoil and revegetated. So it will be basically as it was before mining began ... the same as it's been for hundreds of thousands of years."
Not so, say traditional owners and environmentalists. Jabiluka tells how the government is pandering to big business and disempowering the community through semi-government instrumentalities or government-funded bodies such as the Northern Lands Council.
Caganoff concluded: "Wild Spaces is not concerned so much with the technical quality of the film as with the content. A group of activists that go and blockade an illegally logged coup in the south-east forests may take along a handy cam, shoot some amazing footage and then roughly edit a story together. We'll take that and screen it next to the higher budget films.
"Seeing local, national and international films screened alongside each other is an incredibly powerful thing. I've seen audiences walk out of the cinema overwhelmed by the fact that they can do something to help save the planet."
The festival will screen at 6.30pm each evening from November 25-29. Loggerheads screens on November 25, and Jabiluka on November 26. Call (02) 4787 9192 for more information.