Renewed attention at this year's Sundance Film Festival is gathering around the Mother of All Problems: Global Warming. Everything's Cool, a self-described "Real-Life Disaster Movie" made by Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand (both worked on Blue Vinyl), follows in the wake left by the surprisingly popular 2006 hit An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth explained the science behind global climate change and has now grossed over $20 million dollars, making it the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time.

Indie IN indiein.comEverything's Cool focuses on the "most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action". Despite reams of unassailable science and decades of work by activists and authors, very little has actually been done by anyone to address climate change. This is partially due to a conflicted public consciousness stemming from industry obfuscation insisting that a "debate" still exists. Everything's Cool is about the people involved in this debate:

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.

The film features Bill Mckibben (The End of Nature), Ross Gelbspan (Boiling Point), Dr. Heidi Cullen (Climate expert at The Weather Channel and host of The Climate Code), Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (The Death of Environmentalism), and Rick Piltz (Director of Climate Science Watch).

Before An Inconvenient Truth, "I didn't know" might have been a believable answer, but now many more people claim to understand global warming. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Attempting to address this other gap - the gap between information and action - Judith Helfand and others contributed to a Sundance Panel entitled "How Movies that Matter Can Matter". The panel generally concluded that film can be a platform for political and social activism. In conjunction with the premier of Everything's Cool, I helped the film cast, crew, and other volunteers organize an aerial message:

Today 800 students, along with the cast and crew of "Everything's Cool," a film that premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival, will form a message with their bodies which will spell out "Step It Up." The image also contains a circle with bear paws, representing carbon neutral footprints and a word in Inuktitut meaning, "I hear you and I am doing something about it." Park City's students are sending that message back to the Arctic Inuit Community, who on Earth Day 2005 lay on the Arctic Sea ice in 30 below temperatures sharing the ancient wisdom of their elders and warning the world about the devastating impact the melting arctic will have on the rest of the world.

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Along with bringing attention to the film, the aerial message helped kick off Bill Mckibben's "Step It Up" campaign, a "a brand-new, mass-protest climate movement for 2007". Step It Up asks congress to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050, and will culminate in April 14th rallies all over America.

I'm in the circle… (c/o Deseret News)

Although not widely reported, the photo event also underscored the Sundance Film Fest's purchase of Blue Sky Wind Credits to offset its own carbon emissions (kudos to Sara Baldwin of Utah Clean Energy for making this happen).

This year's synergy of film, the environmental movement, and activism was enough to make my head spin. Check out the Everything's Cool Website, Bill Mckibben's Step it Up 2007 Campaign, and the Sundance Film Festival.

See also Grist magazine: Sundance: Stepping up and out, and Sundance: A Q&A with Ross Gelbspan.