How can filmmakers whose movies touch on similar issues collaborate? How can they not!?!

I’m preparing to spend next week in the Bay Area with some amazing and dedicated filmmakers and audience engagement coordinators. We’ll be figuring out where the overlaps in their campaigns lie and how they can cover more ground together than they could alone. The films chosen for this innovative retreat are Cape Wind, Deep Down, Dirty Business, Gas Land, Split Estate, Sun Come Up, and When Two Worlds Collide. These projects are all focusing on the impact of unchecked natural resource extraction and/or innovative solutions for turning things around before it is too late. You can watch the trailers on our workshop page.

1Sky, 350.org, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and MIT Center for Future Civic Media will join us for the first three days helping to ground the stories and themes in the films to the urgent and timely needs of the movement – helping us with the nuances that are crucial to making an impact.

On day four, we’ll head to the Brower Center in Berkeley and will be joined by a number of groups central to the energy and natural resource revolution, including Bay Localize, Conservation International, Critical Resistance, Earthworks, Environmental Working Group, Green for All, NRDC, Physicians For Social Responsibility (SF), Post Carbon Institute, Progressive Jewish Alliance, Project Survival Media, Rainforest Action Network, The Redford Center, Sierra Club, Speak Out, The 11th Hour Project, and additional foundation funders and individual donors.

At the end of the week we’ll regroup with the filmmakers and audience engagement coordinators to determine the essential next steps to help collaboration flourish.

We’ll be sure to post updates along the way here, as well as on our Facebook and Twitter page. If you are with an organization, foundation, or brand and are interested in joining this collaborative in some capacity in the future, contact me at khenry at workingfilms.org.