October 26, 2022
October 26, 2022 – On a Wing and a Prayer, a documentary profiling the work of an aerial photographer who has made dozens of flights in a homemade paraglider over Louisiana’s fast-retreating coastline, has been named the winner of the Bloomberg Green Docs competition. The contest honors short films addressing the urgency of climate change. The announcement was made this evening during the Green Docs Film Festival at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
The winning film is the work of directors Nadia and Dominic Gill and follows landscape photographer Ben Depp, who has set out to chronicle the loss of Louisiana wetlands in a series of high-art aerial photographs. Depp works from the skies in his 21-foot paragliding wing that he maneuvers with a motor-driven propeller strapped to his back. The film follows Depp to Louisiana’s barrier islands where he flies his glider and observes the way fossil fuel extraction in the region is speeding up the process of coastal erosion.
The jury for Bloomberg Green Docs consisted of Ed Begley, Jr., Golden Globe and seven-time Emmy-nominated actor; Oliver English, filmmaker, chef and food advocate at Common Table Creative; John Fraher, senior executive editor at Bloomberg; Deanna A. Hence, atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Sam Heughan, actor; Anna Jane Joyner, founder and director of Good Energy; Eva Orner, Academy and Emmy award-winning filmmaker; Aaron Rutkoff, executive editor of Bloomberg Green; and Jill Tidman, executive director of the Redford Center.
The evening’s program featured screenings of five documentaries honored as finalists, a Q&A panel with the judges and Dominic Gill, and remarks from Rutkoff, Joyner, and English, who screened a trailer for his film Feeding Tomorrow.
The Bloomberg Green Docs contest accepted submissions of short documentary films that are no more than ten minutes in length on a topic related to nature, global warming, the outdoors or the environment.
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