Shifting Sands
The Mojave- a landscape of extreme and fragile beauty- will encounter new challenges with the coming climate change. Desert field researchers tell the story in their words and share their experiences with us. Joshua trees, Bighorn sheep, pupfish, desert springs, and even the soil crust itself face new problems.
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The Secret Life of Chaos
Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.
It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?
In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?
It’s a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.
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Act of God
‘Act of God’ is a film about lightning. There are stories, some miraculous, others tragic, of people who have been struck by it; various people interested in it, or more generally, in the effects of electricity on the human brain, tell us why; and there is also some footage of storms. But there’s no science, and no structure either; and the choice of material never seems other than random, the selection is too broad to make the film seem personal, but too sketchy to make the film definitive. The director is clearly in awe of in his subject, but ultimately doesn’t appear to have very much to tell us about it, although getting hit by a bolt is clearly a bad idea. In truth, as a viewer, I was bored.
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The U.S. vs. John Lennon
A, some may say, long overdue reminder of the fact that one of this century’s greatest musicians was also a radical political spokesperson for a generation, before he was permanently silenced on 8 Dec 1980. The U.S. vs. John Lennon, showing at Watershed from Fri 8 – Thu 21 Dec, is a fascinating, richly detailed documentary which focuses on John Lennon’s post-Beatle decade when he took a foray into radical American politics.
The film details what happened when the U.S. Government started to perceive that the media attention which the Liverpudlian singer and new wife Yoko Ono were garnering could be a threat to them. Skilfully combining archival footage, Yoko Ono’s home movies, and interviews with everyone from Gore Vidal to G. Gordon Liddy, directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld explore Lennon’s peace activism against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent decades in recent American history, 1966-1976. The result is an eye-opening exposé of the covert tactics Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon and his cronies used in their efforts to try and silence and even deport Lennon.
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MicroCosmos
A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.