BUIES CREEK — Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Mark Kitchell will present his latest film, “A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet,” at Campbell University at 7 p.m. on April 11 in the School of Business’ Lynch Auditorium.
The film will be followed by a question-and-answer session, presented by the University’s Lecture Symposium Committee and 1 More Film Blog. Kitchell will be introduced by Dr. Kenneth Morefield, Campbell University English professor and Christianity Today film critic.
“A Fierce Green Fire” is a history, told in five acts, of the environmental movement from the 1960s to the present. It is narrated by Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Ashley Judd, Van Jones and Isabel Allende.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Kitchell’s new film “brings to light the vital stories of the environmental movement where people fought – and succeeded – against enormous odds. From halting dams in the Grand Canyon to fighting toxic waste at Love Canal; from Greenpeace to Chico Mendes; from climate change to the promise of transforming our civilization.”
Rick McManus, writing for the Sierra Club, describes A Fierce Green Fire as “an indispensable primer for anyone unfamiliar with the breadth of the global environmental movement, and a shot in the arm for movement veterans in search of new inspiration.”
Kitchell is best known for “Berkeley in the Sixties,” which won the Sundance Audience Award in 1990, was nominated for an Academy Award, and won other top honors. It has become a well-loved classic, one of the defining documentaries about the protest movements of the 1960s. Kitchell went to NYU film school, where he made The Godfather Comes to Sixth St., a cinema verité look at his neighbors caught up in filming “The Godfather II” – for which he received another (student) Academy Award nomination.
According to Kitchell, his wife came up with the idea for “A Fierce Green Fire” after the two of them searched in vain for a “big picture documentary” about the environmental movement. They then developed the film together, drawing inspiration from what Kitchell calls Paul Hawken’s “brilliant metaphor of the movement as humanity’s immune response system.”
Dr. Sherry Truffin, associate professor of English, is currently serving as chairman of the Lecture Symposium Committee.