The Green Quad Learning Center is proud to welcome Judith Helfand, a nationally-known activist filmmaker, who will be screening her new film--a hot new documentary about global warming in America, fresh from its world premiere at Sundance:

"Everything's Cool"

Tuesday, April 10th, at 7:30 p.m.

Green (West) Quad Learning Center

Helfand is one of the most accomplished environmental filmmakers on the national scene, and her last two films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.  She will be introducing the film and leading a discussion afterwards.

Helfand will also be participating in two other events.  At 2:00 p.m., she will be speaking on the topic of "Serious Fun:  Making and Using Activist Documentary for Social Change."  And at 3:30 p.m., she will be screening her previous film, Blue Vinyl:  The World's First Toxic Comedy, a Sundance award-winning and Emmy-nominated film plus “activist” extras!  Q and A with the filmmaker to follow.

Helfand combines her interests in filmmaking with a strong desire to stimulate social change.  "Everything's Cool" (http://www.everythingscool.org/) follows the struggle of environmental activists who attempt to mobilize the country about climate change, during what might very well become known as "those last years of U.S. global warming denial - that halcyon time when America finally 'got it' and then had about three minutes to join the rest of the globe in dealing with it."  (See more information below.)

Helfand's previous film, Blue Vinyl:  The World's First Toxic Comedy (http://www.bluevinyl.org/), is a fascinating exploration of the need for alternative materials, examining the vinyl chloride industry and the health consequences.  Part family comedy and part horrifying investigative reportage, Blue Vinyl can make one simultaneously laugh and shiver with fear in the same, deceptively low-key moments.  Helfand, upset that her parents are re-siding their house with blue vinyl, sets out (with co-director Daniel B. Gold) to discover how vinyl is made and why, according to some scientists, it is the most hazardous of synthetic materials. Along the way, she meets industry representatives who tell her the key chemical ingredient in vinyl, chloride, is no more toxic than table salt. She also travels to Venice, Italy, to meet with families of vinyl factory workers dead or dying from chemical exposure, and she visits an intrepid, Louisiana attorney who has sued American vinyl manufacturers on behalf of severely injured former employees. The tale is grim, yet the often on-screen Helfand's approach is folksy and calm--less so when her skeptical parents reject, in several funny scenes, even empirical data about a product they find so convenient.

USC's Green Quad Learning Center is a one-story building in the middle of the Green (also known as West) Quad. The Quad is located south of Wheat St between Main and Sumter. There is a walkway through the middle of the Quad running between Main and Sumter, and the entrance to the Learning Center is off the walkway between four palmetto trees.

For a map, go to: http://www.sc.edu/cgi-bin/uscmap/uscmap.cgi?type=number&data=146

Parking is available on the top level of the Sumter Street Parking Garage (as you drive down the hill on Sumter, from Blossom toward Wheat, take the first driveway on your right).  Some parking is also available along Sumter & Main Streets.  There are also two university parking lots nearby, one on Main Street between Blossom & Wheat and the other off Sumter Street, further down the hill (south) across the creek.

********************************

EVERYTHING'S COOL:  A REAL-LIFE DISASTER MOVIE

After two decades of research, computer modeling and miles of ancient glaciers melting away, most scientists around the world agree that human behavior is causing global warming and it is happening faster than ever anticipated.

Policy makers around the globe are now more than ever looking incredulously at the United States and waiting for some action; if the U.S. as a nation and a government does not aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, the problem of climate change will eventually dwarf all other economic and social problems. Inaction by the U.S. places everyone else on the planet in jeopardy.

Early 2007, the good news is that many leaders of the industrialized world are finally focusing on strategies for a low-carbon future.

The bad news is that here in America, while Al Gore has certainly put a respectable dent in the impenetrable wall of American denial about climate change, there is still no federal strategy on the issue and the only energy bill on the table lavishes billions of dollars on the very industries that are the source of the pollution and problem.

The people of the United States and millions of not-yet-born future citizens are in very deep trouble. Enter EVERYTHING'S COOL - a "toxic comedy" about global warming coming to America.

MEET THE GLOBAL WARMING MESSENGERS: Linked by a common struggle, a group of self appointed global warming messengers are on a high stakes quest to understand why a crisis they see as urgent and terrifying is greeted by their fellow citizens as distant and irrelevant and by their government with apathy, denial, and perhaps, even criminal neglect.

THEIR MISSION: To find the iconic image, the perfect frame, the electrifying language or the political hot button that will finally move a wary and reluctant citizenry and their elected officials to take meaningful action on climate change.

THEIR CHALLENGE: To enlighten and educate Americans, thus shifting consumers away from the fuels that have powered the greatest increases in technology, wealth and living standards in history.

THEIR NEMESES: The recalcitrant politicians, the fossil-fuel corporations and the right-wing think tanks that do their bidding, by working tirelessly to obscure the science and gum up the works of government to defeat climate-friendly legislation and promote the unrestrained use of fossil fuels.

THE TIMEFRAME: YESTERDAY!

THE STORY: EVERYTHING'S COOL follows the struggle of these very dedicated, sometimes a bit depressed, but always compassionate and passionate global-warming messengers. Their journey turns into a snapshot of what might very well become known as "those last years of U.S. global warming denial - that halcyon time when America finally 'got it' and then had about three minutes to join the rest of the globe in dealing with it."

Along the way, we chronicle the tenacious swan song of the messengers from the other side. These are the fossil fuel-funded skeptics who, like sprinters at the end of a marathon, are pushing even harder to maintain their perverse campaign of injecting doubt and uncertainty into what is clearly a dwindling public debate about global warming. Dwindling, but not dead yet...Thanks to the insatiable appetite of our media to deliver a "balanced" story, these die-hard naysayer-messengers can still be heard, seen, and read on radio, TV, and in newspapers nationwide as they desperately plead their tired argument that nobody's really certain what causes global warming and nobody's really certain what could be the results of a warmer world.

We follow the country and our global warming messengers through an extraordinary three years of transformation, from 2003-to the eve of 2007:

Bill McKibben: “The Poet Laureate” of global warming literally wrote the book on this issue when he published The End of Nature in 1987. After 20 years of impassioned writing, speaking, blogging and advocacy, he finally takes to the streets. He realizes “The thing that has been missing from the movement is THE MOVEMENT!”, and he and others stage the largest global warming demonstration in U.S. history (to date). There might be hope for our democracy and our planet.

Ross Gelbspan: The “Columbo of Climate Change” has recently come to believe that his decade of writings, interviews, public readings and policy discussions have come to nothing and he is more than ready to retire. Yet, like a “firehouse dog,” every time the alarm bell rings he is back on the job.

Dr. Heidi Cullen: Heidi is the first on-air climatologist in America exclusively dedicated to covering the global warming beat. As a PhD from Columbia University and an expert in multi-decadal oscillation, can she distill her vast scientific knowledge into 30-second sound bites for The Weather Channel?

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus: Two thirty-something Berkeley, CA based “eco-messiahs”, otherwise known as the “Bad Boys of Environmentalism” rise to the top of the green charts for levying a radical critique of the movement, The Death of Environmentalism. The self-published essay challenged what has, until now, been the basis of almost all climate change messaging - the “I have a nightmare” speech of polar bears floating away on ice caps.

Rick Piltz: His job was to prepare scientific reports to congress on the latest research on climate change. Repressed and depressed by political censorship, Rick Piltz went from downtrodden public servant to front page news when he blew the lid off the White House’s scandalous manipulation of global warming science.

Bish Neuhouser: A frustrated snow groomer (who has less and less snow to groom) at the Canyons resort near Park City, determined to convert first his 1970s Mercedes, then all of the Canyons’ vehicles, to biodiesel.

While our global warming messengers urgently search for the Holy Grail of climate change communication, they are presented with two opportunities for extreme global warming messaging - the release of the sci-fi feature "THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW" and the 2004 general election. We explore both of these: "The Day After Tomorrow" from behind the scenes, including the prep for the May 31st premiere at New York's Museum of Natural History, replete and resplendent in thousands of pounds of fake snow; and the days just before the election from behind the wheel of a fifteen-foot box truck wrapped in high-resolution images of climate change. We call it the Do You Care? Mobile.

All the while, the planet is melting. And in the Arctic, native people are experiencing dramatic and calamitous warming in their communities, not later or tomorrow, but now.

In their own ironic and desperate way these so-sad-they-are-funny-but-true-stories of extreme messaging and adaptation might very well be the thing that finally speaks to the American public.

As much about messaging as it is about the messengers, as much about human nature as it is about humans’ impact on nature, EVERYTHING’S COOL explores what it will take to move America from laggard nation to world leader on global warming.

Our ultimate challenge - and we are up to the task, is to show the audience how urgent this situation really is - and still leave them optimistic and willing to do something. That perhaps is the ultimate challenge to all global warming messengers - which by the end of the film, we as filmmakers are too.

__________________