Film festival shares global, local concerns
Environmental messages abound - sea slugs to salmon to dry farming - in third annual Sonoma event
John Beck
Press-Democrat
01/21/2010
In its third year, the Sonoma Environmental Film Festival knows no boundaries. It's a virtual globe-trotting odyssey that explores threatened salmon in Alaska, sea slugs dancing to aboriginal music, forbidden love in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, Greek spices and seals in Antarctica.
And if you dig a little, you'll find the most local offering — a tiny jewel of a 12-minute documentary shot on a cheap camcorder and edited with barebones iMovie software.
Kate Wilson's “A Return to Dry Farming” isn't the most technologically savvy or fully realized film at the festival, but it's a perfect example of DIY filmmaking and the latest tool in the grassroots environmental movement.
“I took her film blindly without even seeing it,” says festival director Justine Ashton, who dry-farms pinot noir grapes with her husband at Ashton Vineyards in Glen Ellen. “It's just something people should know about.”
She had called Wilson, a former Montessori school teacher who founded all-organic Sky Saddle Wines with her husband, to see if she'd be on a festival discussion panel, only to find that Wilson was mired in her own film, a study of the lost art of dry-farming grapes without any irrigation — a tradition that goes back thousands of years in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece.
The inspiration had come from her own backyard. In 2008, while living on St. Helena Road near the headwaters of Mark West Creek, Wilson began to notice, along with her neighbors, that water flow was drying up in the summer.
“And that hadn't ever, ever happened in the history of mankind,” she says.
When a 1,000-foot well dried up at a nearby vineyard, the owners began trucking in water via diesel trucks — running up and down St. Helena Road all summer long — from another vineyard along the creek down below.
Wilson and her neighbors began to wonder, “If they're running out of water, what about all the other wells around them?”
As the recession slowed down business, Wilson took a “day job” with the environmental group Russian Riverkeeper and began learning about the myriad water issues facing Sonoma County. A self-proclaimed “wannabe filmmaker,” she picked up her Sony camera and tripod and began attending seminars and interviewing dry-farmers and vintners. Her meager budget of around $500 was basically the salary Russian Riverkeeper paid her to work on the project.
In “A Return to Dry Farming,” a Kunde vineyard manager shows off robust leafy vines that have been dry-farmed since the 1880s. In addition to saving thousands of dollars, grape grower Paul Bernier points out how simple the process is, saying in the film: “I just put a stake in the ground and put a vine next to it and call it a vineyard.”
It could be the slogan for the low-budget movie — as roosters crow in the background, an airplane roars overhead and sun spots dance around the lens. The sound is a little rough throughout. But the message of conservation is never compromised.
“Initially, we were just planning to put it up on YouTube and mail it to anyone who has anything to do with grapes,” Wilson says.
That was before she started editing down six hours of footage. Right now, she's still toiling away with all the fervor of a student filmmaker up against deadline: “I've been having all these issues with sound, every shot is a different volume level and I'm moving all the levels around and now iMovie is getting really slow.”
After she debuts her first film ever at a festival, she hopes “people walk out thinking — why don't we go back to dry farming? Grapes were never farmed any other way until the '60s when UC Davis people came along and showed us how to do drip irrigation. So why not try to go back to that so we can save water for the fish and human activity?”
