Documentary Production and Distribution News

New film takes sustainability into practice to create experimental documentary.

(Pittsburgh, PA) Combining deep green topics, independent production, art house ideals, and the medium of documentary filmmaking is "Sust Enable: The Metamentary", an exploratory documentary that seeks answers to the question, “What does sustainability mean?” Going beyond the commercial media soundbites, this film looks at the active debates about the meaning of sustainability and probes different concepts of sustainability for common themes. As interviewees from diverse walks of life provide their unique perspectives on what sustainability means, the story challenges audiences to look for evidence of these sustainability themes in the phenomena of everyday life. The filmmakers’ goal is “to use compelling, creative documentary storytelling to challenge popular attitudes about the meaning of sustainability, and to make important emerging theories about sustainability more accessible for discussion among American audiences by transmuting them into an artfully-told and emotionally-impacting film.”

How "Sust Enable: The Metamentary" intends to achieve that goal, however, is what makes this film really provocative. Borrowing from the sustainability principle of holism (the idea that everything is interconnected and interdependent and thus, for a system to achieve sustainability, it must embody its values throughout its processes), "Sust Enable: The Metamentary" will explore its driving question, “what does sustainability mean?,” at all levels of the film’s creation--the story, the stylistic choices, and the film’s real world production processes.

“Only by investing in a sustainably-minded process will we be able to deliver the best possible film product about the deep meanings of sustainability,” says director Caroline Savery. Caroline Savery, a graduate of Point Park University’s Cinema & Digital Arts program in 2008, speaks from experience. In 2008, she produced an educational web-based episode series, called Sust Enable, about trying to live under a “one-planet-Earth-sized” environmental footprint# in urban Pittsburgh, PA. The project, called Sust Enable, claimed to be about how an individual American can achieve “100% sustainability” through radically modifying their lifestyle. After three months of struggling through unlivable conditions, broken crew and personal relationships, exhaustion and breakdown, Caroline was left with serious doubts about what “100% sustainability” really means....

“One of the most important things I learned from Sust Enable was that you can’t make a film about achieving sustainability without practicing sustainability throughout the making of the film, too--because the ‘behind-the-scenes’ experience always ends up influencing what you see in front of the camera. That’s what’s special about the subject of sustainability--it’s not a subject so much as it is paradigm, a way of looking at the world,” Caroline says. This time around, drawing on the many lessons of 2008’s Sust Enable, the new documentary film "Sust Enable: The Metamentary" is “all about” sustainability--from how the crew relations are structured to how the crew engages their community in shaping the project. Now joining Caroline is a collective of young talented crew of producers and interns committed to innovating a “sustainable model” of filmmaking. “A sustainable system is one that can adapt and sustain itself indefinitely. To me, that suggests that a sustainable group process needs to be inclusive and empowering for everyone involved,” says Caroline.

Joining the crew on this exploration is the surrounding community of Pittsburghers and of people interested in participating in sustainability from around the world. Once every month the film's crew and supporters gather to discuss their thoughts about the film, sustainability, and the progress at “Community Feedback” discussions hosted by the Pittsburgh Filmmakers. These open-ended chats generate new ideas about who to interview, how to raise money, and how to honor the needs of community and filmmakers both. By viewing this film as a gathering point to share best ideas and practices of sustainability, and as an open-ended collaborative effort at every level, "Sust Enable: The Metamentary" hopes to foster a fresh approach to exploring these important issues that affect all of us.

Resources:

www.Sust-Enable.com