- Director: Jon Shenk
- Country: USA
- Year: 2011
- Length: 101 minutes
- Genre: Documentary
- Screening Times: Friday, March 9th, 2012 at 8 pm
Co-presented with Green Living
Synopsis
Mohamed Nasheed spent two decades leading a pro-democracy movement against a cruel dictatorship in the Maldives, suffering imprisonments and torture until groundswell support elected him president at age forty-one. Suddenly he found himself facing a new crisis: the possible extinction of his own country. If ocean levels continue to rise at their current rate, over a thousand coral islands of the Maldives will be submerged like a modern Atlantis. Obtaining remarkable access to Nasheed during his first year in office, director Jon Shenk offers both an inspiring personal story and an insider’s look at the dirty business of political deal-making during the 2009 climate change summit at Copenhagen. Though deemed a failure by many, Copenhagen marked a historic agreement between China, India and the United States to reduce carbon emissions—a deal in which, as the film reveals, Nasheed played a key role. Featuring stunning cinematography and a haunting score by Radiohead, The Island President is one of the year’s most essential documentaries.
Director’s Bio
Jon Shenk is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a founder of Actual Films in San Francisco. He recently produced, directed, and photographed “The Beginning,” a cinema verité documentary about the making of “Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace,” which was released on the “Phantom Menace” DVD. His films “Dark Rooms” and “Naked to the World” have aired on PBS and have won many awards. He has field-produced and photographed documentaries for MTV’s “True Life” series about high school football in Texas and about the culture surrounding the drug MDMA (Ecstasy). He produced two documentaries for the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s series “Teaching in the Digital Age.” Jon works as a freelance documentary cinematographer for PBS, National Geographic, A&E, Bravo, CBS, NBC, and the BBC. He also worked as assistant editor on “Cadillac Desert,” a PBS series by Jon Else about the history of the struggle for water in the American West. He earned his Masters in Documentary Filmmaking from Stanford University in 1995.
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