Movies on the Environment: for old people

As previously promised I have searched for and found environmentally themed movies specifically for adults! I say specifically because the others mentioned are not just for kids (seriously, people get decapitated in Princess Mononoke). There are a great volume of films with an environmental message buried somewhere in the subtext but some of the more obvious ones are: Chinatown, Erin Brockovich and the Whale Rider... Unfortunately I have seen none of these movies. Please comment if you have.

One I have seen which could be interpreted as holding an environmental message is Samson and Delilah (2009). This film follows the lives of two fourteen year old Australian aborigines (played by Australian aborigines) and provides an unusual perspective on one of the most marginalised peoples on the planet.

The director (Warwick Thornton), though he had a bigger budget available, used only a few thousand dollars to make this movie; spending most of it on decent camera film. He also employed his vagrant alcoholic brother to effectively play himself, a bum living under a bridge. As a character he provides the only real compassion shown by any white person to the two aborigines.

Though on the face of it this is not a film about environmentalism, it looks at the detrimental effects of invasive culture on endemic ways of life. The analogy between culture and wildlife in this regard is an old one. In the film there are some occasions where Samson utilises his knowledge of survival in the bush, to kill a kangaroo, to find water, but the introduction of petrol sniffing to his relatively uneventful life almost destroys him.

The message here is not as blatant as something like Dances with Wolves or Avatar, that the local people are - to coin a phase - ‘Noble Savages’. Instead it looks at the reality of one of the world’s oldest peoples being tolerated and ostensibly helped but in actual fact turned into feral animals in their own country.