Fri Films Featuring a proFundity of natural beauty from the Coastside Film Society

FOUR FILMS FEATURING NATURAL BEAUTY

-- Two shorts shot on the San Mateo Coastside --
 
Hot Stuff (6 mins)
Pacifica's own Kayla Sanchez and Kari Biel's short about a boy and his red pepper. The film is hilarious and  won the silver prize at last year's Coastside Teen Film Fest.
 
Just Another Day in Half Moon Bay (3 mins)
A video slideshow from poet/photographer Lou Solitske. This one features a selection of Lou's beautiful local nature photographs of our coastside carefully cut to traditional music. 
 
 --Two Features from Far Away Lands --
 
Mine Story of a Sacred Mountain (16 minutes)
Mine tells the story of the battle between an underdog, the Dongria Kondh tribe of India, and Vedanta Resources, a huge mining corporation. As the beautiful photography in the film attests, the home territory of the Dongria Kondh is both remote and extraordinarily beautiful. Contracts were written that would allow Vedanta to strip mine the "holy" mountain tops to get at all that bauxite. When the filmmakers arrived to document this David and Goliath story, the assumption was that this Goliath was going to win. As everyone knows, that is not how this story was destined to end.
 
China: The Panda Adventure (48 minutes)
 
In 1936, a widow named Ruth Harkness arrived in China to settle the affairs of her husband Bill who died while  observing a mysterious animal known as the giant panda. No surprise --everyone knew pandas were ferocious and dangerous beasts not the gentle herbivores described in Bill's notes.  Ruth decided to follow in the footsteps of her husband and prove to the world that her husband was right. The Panda Adventure is a retelling of Ruth's story, shot in the remote Chinese mountain terrain that pandas call home. The footage is breathtaking and the close-ups of these gentle giants in their natural habitat is heartwarming.