CineCulture: Silent River and Sea of Troubles

Discussant:  Jason Jaacks (Director & Producer of Silent River and Sea of Troubles)

The Santiago River, known locally as “the River of Death,” flows along the outskirts of Guadalajara, Mexico. For forty years, waste from one of Mexico’s largest manufacturing corridors has been dumped into the Santiago. 80% of the companies in the corridor – such as IBM, HP, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Honda and Nestlé – are American and Japanese. Therefore. this river has become a sewer with over 1000 known chemicals, including dangerously high levels of arsenic, chrome, and lead. Silent River by Jason Jaacks  follows a young woman and her family as they defy death threats to try and save the one of the most polluted rivers in Mexico.

Sea of Troubles Trailer from Bay Nature on Vimeo.

Over the last three years we witnessed some of the strangest conditions ever seen off the West Coast of the United States. What happens next? Was this just a weird few years, an anomaly in the normal flux of ocean conditions? Or was this a shift that we will look back on, decades from now, and point to as the beginning of a different era? Join an oceanographer and a paleo-climatologist from the Bodega Marine Laboratory on the northern California coast ponder what’s next for the world’s largest ocean. Sea of Troubles