Christal Films is proud to announce that “The Green Chain” has been selected to compete for the Vancouver International Film Festival’s new $25,000 “Climate for Change Award” — one of the largest cash awards at any film festival in North America.

The series includes dramatic features and documentaries and “The Green Chain” is the only Canadian film in competition and one of only two dramatic entries. “The Green Chain,” which deals with the people behind the issues in today’s forests, is written and directed by Mark Leiren-Young. The movie stars Tricia Helfer and Tahmoh Penikett (from TV’s Battlestar Galactica), Genie and Gemini award winner and recent Emmy nominee August Schellenberg (Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, The New World, Black Robe), Genie and Gemini award winner Brendan Fletcher (The Pacific, RV), Gemini Award winner Babz Chula, and Vancouver actors Jillian Fargey (Mount Pleasant) and Scott McNeil (Sleeping With Strangers). The new annual award is and is sponsored by Kyoto Planet, “a new eco-conscious company with three distinct but interrelated parts: a financial vehicle to support and facilitate investment in, and management of, business opportunities in the green sector, a foundation to award grants and manage the non-profit portion of the company’s business, and a consumer company grounded by a broad portal to serve as the preeminent marketplace for knowledge, ideas, discussion and goods and services in the environmental space.” VIFF Director Alan Franey says, “This is a major and very important development for our festival. Although it is true that we have featured many films on environmental issues over the years, the generous and enlightened support of Kyoto Planet encourages us to put environmentally themed films front and centre in our program.”

The production of The Green Chain was financed in participation with Telefilm Canada, TMN – The Movie Network and Movie Central and will be distributed by Christal Films across Canada in 2008.

For more on the Climate for Change Award visit KyotoPlanet.  Information on the film can be had at “The Green Chain” Official Website.

Free screenings of the movie Arctic Tale are being made available to the public, nationwide, in the USA. The movie takes audiences of all ages on an epic adventure. Looking at life in the Arctic, under threat in a warming, melting, world.

The free screenings are open to the public via the movie’s official website

Movie Synopsis:

From National Geographic Films, the people who brought you MARCH OF THE PENGUINS and Paramount Classics, the studio that brought you AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ARCTIC TALE is an epic adventure that explores the vast world of the Great North. The film follows the walrus, Seela, and the polar bear Nanu, on their journey from birth to adolescence to maturity and parenthood in the frozen Arctic wilderness. Once a perpetual winter wonderland of snow and ice, the walrus and the polar bear are losing their beautiful icebound world as it melts from underneath them. Story told by Queen Latifah.

by Alex Steffen
April 27, 2007

Scientists are telling us that we need to rapidly and substantially reduce our ecological footprint — think one planet, three decades. We’re optimistic that such a transformation is possible, Because we focus on solutions here, we rarely think about, much less report on, what might happen if we fail to miss that mark.

True insight into our day, into what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now,” demands knowing the stakes for which we’re playing. It requires knowing what awaits us if we fail. In this regard, Worldending has it’s place, especially when it helps us grasp a possible future which cuts against the grain of our expectations.

That’s why paleontologist Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future is a worldchanging book: not because it points the way to a solution, but because it provides a new and insightful resource for thinking about the true magnitude of our climate crisis. This is an important piece of green futurism.

Read the full review at WorldChanging