Oscar Buzz For Mountainfilm Documentary

One of the greatest parts about hosting Outside Television’s coverage of Mountainfilm is being exposed to the festival’s endless catalog of groundbreaking documentaries. Films like Gasland, a documentary from last year’s festival by director Josh Fox about the harmful effects of natural gas drilling that was recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. It’s an incredible honor indeed, problem is, some folks aren’t too happy about it—mainly representatives of the oil and gas industry who don’t agree that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, threatens the environment.

In an unprecedented move, an industry lobbying group called Energy In Depth—one set up by Haliburton, BP, Shell and other companies—sent a letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saying that the film should be ineligible for best documentary feature because it contains inaccuracies. “The many errors, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods catalogued … cast serious doubt on Gasland’s worthiness for this most honored award, and directly violate both the letter and spirit of the published criteria that presumably must be met by Gasland’s competitors in this category," the letter said.

The organization, which has an entire section devoted to Gasland on its website called Debunking Gasland, even took a jab at Fox and the actor Mark Ruffalo, who appears in the film, for visiting Congress to support a bill for government regulation of hydraulic fracturing. “It’s clear that this event, scripted by a Hollywood publicist one week before the Academy Awards, is focused on achieving staged drama and inside-the-beltway chatter," Energy in Depth said in a statement.

Not surprisingly Josh Fox is fighting back.

“The gas industry believes it can create a new reality in which their nationwide onshore drilling campaign isn't a disaster,” wrote Fox in a recent Truthout Op-Ed. “But no amount of PR money or slick ads can keep the stories of contamination coming from thousands of Americans from being any less true. We stand behind the testimonials, facts, science and investigative journalism in the film 100 percent.”

Fox is so sure of his film’s findings that he’s posted a point-by-point rebuttal of the group’s claims on his website called Affirming Gasland. Among other arguments, it reiterates how fracking injects hundreds of toxic chemicals imbedded in huge quantities of water up to 8,000 feet below the Earth’s surface—a process that contaminates the environment in potentially irreversible ways.

No matter your stance, the film offers compelling evidence that fracking should be banned. I remember sitting in the audience at Mountainfilm last year, watching in horror as a rural man lit his drinking water on fire, most likely contaminated by methane gas that leaked into his water supply after a natural gas drilling operation set up outside his home. It’s documentary film making at its best and certainly worthy of the Oscar spotlight. As Maurice D. Hinchey, U.S. Representative (NY-22) recently said, “Thanks to Gasland and the millions of grassroots activists across the country, we finally have a counterweight to the influence of the oil and gas industry in our nation's capital,” which seems reason enough to keep this eye-opening Mountainfilm documentary in this weekend’s Hollywood race.

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To learn more about David LaHuta's life in Bermuda read Bermuda Shorts at http://DavidLaHuta.blogspot.com

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