Product Description
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In 2009, filmmaker Josh Fox learned his home in the Delaware
River Basin was on top of the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation
containing natural that stretches across New York,
Pennsylvania and huge stretches of the Northeast. He was offered
$100,000 to lease his land for a new method of drilling developed
by Halliburton and soon discovered this was only a part of a
34-state drilling campaign, the largest domestic natural
drilling boom in history. Part mystery, part travelogue, and part
banjo showdown, land documents Josh's cross-country odyssey to
find out if the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing -
or fracking - is actually safe. As he interviews people who live
on or around current fracking sites, Josh learns of things gone
horribly wrong, from illness to hair loss to flammable water, and
his inquiries lead him ever deeper into a web of secrets, lies,
conspiracy, and contamination - a web that potentially stretches
to threaten the New York Watershed. Unearthing a shocking story
about a practice that is understudied and inadequately regulated,
land races to find answer about fracking before it's far too
late.
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Little did director Josh Fox know that he'd find himself
trailing the history and future of natural mining for this
documentary, land, or so he cls in this moving and
evocative political exposé. Thankfully unpretentious and lacking
in the didacticism that plagues many political documentaries,
land is edifying in the most entertaining and palatable way.
Fox's open-ended questions presented during his narration are
answered by interviewees found as he travels cross-country to
source out water happening as a result of hydraulic
fracturing. The tension begins when Fox researches a letter he
receives in the mail at his rural Pennsylvania farmhouse,
inviting him to sell his land for $100,000 and permission to mine
natural . He comes to discover how the Delaware River
watershed's imminently endangered status will threaten New York
City's main water source, and towards the end of the film focuses
on New York City, as respected politicians like John Gennaro and
Congressman Maurice Hinchey speak on behalf of this issue. But
before filming congressional hearings, Fox charts his personal
dilemma and how it quickly spirals outward, as first his
neighbors tell him horror stories about water contamination due
to this process. And as he tours Colorado, Wyoming, and Texas,
where hydraulic fracturing has already contaminated myriad
underground wells, Fox actually films many families' water
faucets catching fire as people hold a match to their running tap
water. Fox's continuing investigation ties this unchecked
process to Dick Cheney's Halliburton activity and bills
covertly passed during the Bush administration. land does not
have a conspiratorial feel; it takes an honest, even-keeled
investigative approach and relies on information relayed to Fox
from renowned activists like Dr. Theo Colborn and Environmental
Protection Agency staffer Weston Wilson. This documentary sheds
light on what has been a practice that many American citizens
have assumed mysterious and possibly benign. It is easy to
understand why land has garnered so many film festival awards,
since it presents vital information that will necessitate action
once it reaches enough of the population. This is grassroots
documentary filmmaking at its finest. --Trinie Dalton