Woodstock Film Fest writeup

This is over a month old but we missed it. The author couldn’t be called the biggest fan of the film. The response is reminiscent of the audience response in San Fran, which is to say they want “solutions.”

But first, in the morning, I catch Laura Dunn’s documentary about the effects of aggressive development on the city of Austin, Texas, The Unforeseen. This film clearly has some money behind it – Robert Redford and Terrence Malick are listed as executive producers – which explains the delicate and expensive-looking animations showing the growth of suburbs and razing of farmland around Austin.

Dunn traces Austin’s development since the 1970s, when it was lauded as a place where “the cowboys and the hippies are getting along better than anywhere else in the world.” Alas, the good vibes didn’t last: with suburban sprawl came serious environmental damage, and the result was a heated standoff between developers and environmentalists.

Chronicling all of this in painstaking detail, Dunn makes no bones about her agenda (it could be summed up as “development is bad for children and other living things”) but she does makes some effort at balance. There’s a poignant interview with Gary Bradley, an Austin developer who lost everything in the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 1980s, and who comes across as a fundamentally decent guy.

Unfortunately, Dunn never explores more sustainable alternatives to the big, bad development projects, and the film suffers from an excess of earnestness. (There are a few too many Malick-like close-ups of waving wheat stalks and water drops on branches.) My neighbor in the audience, who outs himself as a former developer from the Bay Area, grouses that the film is “long on criticism, short on solutions” and reluctantly, I have to agree.