An introduction to a few award winning films from our catalogue of "Video Films on Environment" 

Uranium
Country : Canada
Length : 48’
Language : English
Production Co. : National Film Board of Canada (NFBC)
Producer/Director : Dale Phillips and Magnus Isacsson

Uranium from Canada’s Radium city mines was used to make the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today the Canadian federal government required that it only be said for peaceful purposes. But, claims this disturbing documentary, the pollution from uranium waste has become a time bomb for Canada’s native people, and threatens to be almost as devastating as those dropped to end the Second World War. By the year 2000, 300 tonnes of uranium waste, containing radioactive by-products which contaminate local water supplies, will have been dumped onland traditionally used by the Mohawk. Greed and chauvinism have triumphed over the collective wisdom of Canada’s native population.

Growing Up
Country : UK
Length : 60’ and 30’
Language : English, French, Spanish
Production Co. : Central TV
Producer/Director : Julian Ware and Bruno Sorrentino

What does the future hold for the children of the new Millennium? From Brazil to China - in Norway, Kenya, India, Latvia, the UK, South Africa and the US - GROWING UP follows the lives of 11 babies born in the year of the 1992 UN Earth Summit to find out. The first programme in the series introduces audience to the children, their parents and the environment in which they will grow up. In the Northern Kenya, Erdo is the daughter of Turkana herders, Esther and Christopher. But their lives are shattered when raider steal their cattle, and they are reduced to cutting the few remaining trees in the region to make charcoal to feed their children. In China’s Gaunghzhou City, baby Leong Yukkay is the first and only child her parents Liang and Zheng will have. Zheng works in a factory manufacturing paper: effluents from the plant pollute the air and the local countryside - but it’s typical of China’s wholesale drive to develop and catch up with the industrialised north. And in India - where child labour is illegal but often ignored - baby Panjarvanarn’s older sisters already work in a local match-making factory. Will she escape the same fate? Three years later, the second progamme returns to measure the children’s progress. Some things have changed for the better. Some haven’t changed at all. In South Africa, for instance, where President Mandela’s government has replaced the old National Party regime, baby Justin’s parents welcome the changes which mean everyone working together for a better country - and even feel relaxed enough to take a holiday. But in nearby Ciskei, where baby Vusumzi lives with her single mother Mavis, conditions are still very much as they were in 1992. And in northern California, a question mark still hangs over the future of baby Stephanie as the exploitation of the last remaining temperate forests continues apace. Throughout the 1990s GROWING UP will pose a continuing challenge to deliver on the promises made at the Rio Earth Summit.

Bruno Bozzetto Spots
Country : Italy
Length : 16’
Production Co. : World Wild-life Fund for Nature (WWF Italy)
Director/Animator : Bruno Bozzetto

A man and his baby stand next to Planet Earth. As the baby looks on from his pram, the man puts up factories, wells, power plants and motorways across the face of the globe. The noise of traffic and machinery builds to a crescendo as a dense cloud of pollution descends from the sky, blocking out the sun, until it reaches the man and he collapses. This is just one of the sharp, funny morality tales in a new collection of animated ‘spots’ from Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto designed to remind audiences that the earth’s resources are far from limited. Another shows the earth used as a dustbin, accommodatingly opening up to receive generations of waste. Once full, it is wrapped up with a bow and presented to a child - whereupon it explodes in his face.

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