Diseases that were largely eradicated in the United States a generation ago – whooping cough, measles, mumps – are returning, in part because nervous parents are skipping their children’s shots. VACCINES – CALLING THE SHOTS takes viewers around the world to track epidemics, explore the science behind vaccinations, and shed light on the risks of opting out.
It’s a mystery on a global scale: five times in Earth’s past, life has been nearly extinguished, the vast majority of plant and animal species annihilated in a geologic instant. What triggered these dramatic events? And what might they tell us about the fate of our world?
JOHNSON CITY — It’s not uncommon to see a white-tailed deer herd or a doe with her fawns crossing from one side of the road to the other. For some kids, that’s as close as they get to Mother Nature, which is a travesty to Maggie Goodman, librarian at the Johnson City Library .“All they do is sit with whatever kind of game they play,” she said. “It’s sensory deprivation. I think this is an important mission, to make sure kids learn how inspiring nature is.”Goodman is taking action with “Backyard Wilderness,” the library’s latest exhibit. It opens for a two-month-long stay at 10 a.m.
The festival will close with another double bill: “Serengeti Rules” and “She Is the Ocean.” “ ‘Serengeti’ is one of the most beautiful, visually stunning documentaries I’ve ever seen,” says Rivers. “They shot in the Serengeti but also in the Aleutian Islands, the Pacific Northwest and Peru, and it’s all about our need to preserve the balance of life on Earth. It’s an extremely hopeful film. ‘She Is the Ocean’ is a wonderful documentary about nine women and their relationship to the ocean, and the second part of a trilogy from director Innesse Biohina.”
A heartening work on climate change came in Nicolas Brown’s The Serengeti Rules. Five largely unknown heroes of modern ecology headed into international wildernesses decades ago, driven by curiosity about how nature functions.
CHEVY CHASE, MD (APRIL 27, 2018) — HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, the award winning film production unit of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in association with Fishbowl Films, Motto Pictures, 19340 Productions, Shark Island Institute and Glassbreaker Films is pleased to announce that INVENTING TOMORROW will screen at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival, North America’s largest documentary festival.
In March, I had the opportunity to attend an early screening of a new IMAX documentary, Backyard Wilderness, that is screening in science centers and other specialty IMAX theaters nationally. The film's central message encourages kids and adults to explore the natural world all around them just outside their door—and disconnect from electronic devices that keep them inside.
A celebration of scientific excellence and an account of a discovery which has ramifications for natural environments the world over, The Serengeti Rules makes for compelling viewing. Based on an acclaimed book by Sean B. Carroll, who appears sporadically in the film as a narrator in one of the film’s less elegant devices, the picture draws together the work of five ecologists and naturalists, working in far-flung locations around the globe.
Academy Award-winning Passion Pictures and HHMI Tangled Bank Studios present one of the most important but untold science stories of our time—a tale with profound implications for the fate of life on our planet.
In Nicolas Brown’s documentary The Serengeti Rules, he follows a group of scientists around the world as they studied different ecosystems to see how nature works. They discovered surprising conclusions in what that led to similar conclusions about life on our planet.
