Gasland: a thirst for independent documentary
According to outspoken US director Josh Fox, while his country has put itself in the chopping board deciding to treat itself like a third world country, Australia is treating itself as a developing nation, leasing its own resources to a huge corporation for export. And guess who will get the worst part of that deal?
The man behind Gasland told Cesar Albarran that in a world where corporate interests are taking over, filmmaking is a good way to fight back – and audiences are thirsty for independent long-form documentaries.
Fox has been dealing with the F-word for more than two years. He shakes his head every time he hears it and has embarked in a life-altering journey to vanish it from the face of the planet. But he is far from being a hardcore conservative or member of the League of Decency. The F-word that concerns him is fracking, a drilling technology used by corporations like Halliburton to extract natural gas from the underground of diverse regions in the United States and other parts of the world, like the Chinchilla territory in Queensland. This process (also known as Hydraulic Fracturing) causes the liberation of gases into the water supply and the air, which has derived in diverse ailments for the people whose lands have been drilled, as well as those surrounding them. Legal loopholes created during the Bush-Cheney years have allowed corporations to continue these harmful practices. Industry mongers call these regions a Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Fox, also a playwright and banjo player, is more succinct: he calls them Gasland.
When he received a $100,000 USD offer from an energy company as compensation for letting it drill his property in the Castkills/Proconos region of Upstate New York, he set out to find what this fracking business was all about. He then embarked on a trip across the United States, in which he stumbled upon people of diverse backgrounds affected by the practice. Sinks that catch fire, dead animals, people suffering from paralysing headaches and digestive disorders: all caused by natural gas and the undisclosed chemicals used during fracking. Fox visited 24 of the 34 states in which this practice is widespread: all is documented in Gasland, a heartbreaking yet inspiring first-person approach to the issue.
“You watch all these Americans whose backs are against the wall behave with such dignity,” Fox says of the dozens of people he met while going from facility to facility across the diverse American landscape. “What has happened to them since the film was released? A lot of them now are in such a desperate situation that they are actually contemplating moving. But where are they going to move? They might have to walk away from their property. A lot of them are getting more sick,” he adds.
Since Gasland premiered at Sundance earlier this year, this fracking problem has caught fire in mainstream American media. Fox, who has been invited to primetime slots like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, asserts: “When I first encountered the issue the level of awareness was at a one. Now it might be at a three or a four; I’ve never seen a movement like this in my life. Urban, rural, anyone in between.”
In regards to the result of the recent mid-term elections, in which the Republican Party regained a lot of political ground, and its impact on policy and regulation revisions on the Hydraulic Fracturing issue, Fox is pessimistic: “They might shut down the congressional investigation on the fracking. The gas industry put huge amounts of money in specific campaigns, in Pennsylvania and New York congressional races they had a horse in all those races and they were spending and spending and spending, and in some cases that money did a lot of damage What is at stake right now is American democracy: with this insane ruling from the Supreme Court corporations can donate as much money as they want to any candidate they want. It’s very scary right now, we are turning the USA into Indonesia overnight.”
As bleak as the horizon might seem, Fox is nevertheless hopeful about the transformative power of documentary filmmaking: “We are on the verge of losing control of our country in the United States, and all over the world, to the hands of big corporate interests. And one of the ways in which you can fight back is making a good movie about what’s happening. Long-form journalism about a particular topic is what documentaries are doing very well right now. People are getting their news from documentaries in a way that is independent, that isn’t corporate dominated, that doesn’t have commercials in between every five seconds. And I think there is a thirst for that.”
What is the future of Gasland, a project that is still alive thanks to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, through which the conversation is an ongoing affair?
“We continue to film, and we are going to work on a follow-up piece. We are going to film in Australia. They have built significant developments here.”
Gasland will be released on November 18.
