"Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time?"

"I believe all our hearts are big enough."

8. Documentary Screening: ALBATROSS

Friday, August 24, 3:00 pm to 4:40 pm

8. DOCUMENTARY SCREENING:  ALBATROSS

• Friday, August 24, 2018 3:00 PM – 4:40 PM

• FREE. We encourage donations which will be split between our local non-profit organizations Plumas Audubon Society and Mt. Lassen Theatre as well as ALBATROSS to help spread its message.
• Mt. Lassen Theatre, 200 Main St., Chester (next to the Chester Park)
• Activity level 1

 
DESCRIPTION of FEATURE FILM:
ALBATROSS, a film by artist Chris Jordan, is a powerfully moving love story about birds on Midway Island in the heart of the Pacific whose bodies are filled with our plastic pollution that heavily litters the ocean.  Not your textbook nature documentary, ALBATROSS is a revelatory and existential examination of life, loss and love. Exquisitely beautiful, immensely touching and ultimately inspiring, ALBATROSS takes us on a journey to this remote island that few people ever see. What we glean is a profound understanding of how our everyday material lives intersect with the natural world, even when it seems far away. 

Jordan travelled to Midway a total of eight times over four years to document the lives of the albatross.  Jordan reports that the experience of his first trip was "devastating, not only for what it meant for the suffering of the birds, but also for what it reflected back to us about the destructive power of our culture of mass consumption, and humanity's damaged relationship with the living world."  On subsequent trips he and his team "met the live albatrosses singing and dancing by the hundreds of thousands all over the island...[and] experienced the birds' beauty, grace, and sentience more and more vividly with each trip. The poetry of the albatross revealed itself layer by layer, as [Jordan and his team] were gifted with intimate footage of every stage of their cycles of life, death, and birth."

Through the tragic love story, Jordan declares, "To me, the real challenge, is to develop the capacity to hold it all — to simultaneously feel hopeless and hopeful, and to feel horror, and be connected with beauty and love. I believe all of our hearts are big enough."

The Midway Atoll is home to the largest albatross colony in the world. More than 1.5 million of these birds make their home there, off the coast of Hawaii, thousands of kilometres away from the nearest continent.

ALBATROSS is being given to the world as a new-paradigm gift-economy offering. The main ways it will spread is by word of mouth, social media, and hosted screenings. You can personally amplify its message by sharing your feelings and experience of ALBATROSS through your networks. You can help its audience grow globally by sending it to your friends in other countries.

"Now is the time for radically creative action by all of us on behalf of life, in whatever big or small ways we each have the power to do." - Chris Jordan