Cupuaçu and Air Conditioning
By Daniel de la Calle Iraquara is a village in a mountainous area called Chapada Diamantina, a place of great natural beauty, full of caves and amazing rock formations. To get there we left Salvador’s airport through a long and dense giant bamboo tunnel, managed to squeeze out of the city’s chaotic rush hour to […]
Sao Paulo de Janeiro
By Daniel de la Calle It is 60 degrees, cloudy and windy at times and I am listening to the National’s new record surrounded by maple, oak and pine tress in my office. No more Tim Maia, Marisa Monte, funky carioca or forró. No more Os Mutantes. I will need to close my eyes really […]
Winner in Calabria
We just received news that on June 27th A Sea Change won the competition for Best Video at the Gaia International Festival in Calabria, Italy. The film was screened in the beautiful Aieta Renaissance Palace: Michael Leonardi, the Festival Organizer, wrote Barbara Ettinger to tell her the wonderful news and complement the film: “With all […]
Dancing the Forro
By Daniel de la Calle The first couple screenings in Rio have been the hardest to set up. I had little time to prepare them, to meet the people that pull the strings six thousand miles away. The amount of trust and generosity people I had only met via email have displayed has been so […]
SCRIPPS and A Sea Change: Science and Cinema on a Mission
On Friday night we had a reunion in La Jolla with our colleagues from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was the first time we had gotten together since we stormed COP15. After much strategizing, we have decided to have a repeat performance at COP16 in November. We concluded that we had, in fact, made […]
World Champions
By Daniel de la Calle Three days ago Spain, “we” since I am Spanish, won the Soccer World Championship for the first time. While I was in Brazil in June I attended, absolutely mesmerized, all the Brazilian games and witnessed a paralyzed country absolutely mad about their 11 heroes. People gathered in bars, drank beer […]
Doc in Río
By Daniel de la Calle Dear blog readers, During the next forty some days I will be in Brazil, screening the film around cities and representing the A Sea Change crew at an environmental film festival called FASAI, in the state of Bahía. I will do my best to deliver updates of how things go […]
Sea Level Rise, Ocean Warming and Ocean Acidification
By Daniel de la Calle If you can spare 18 minutes, please watch this video of a conference about the oceans delivered by Professor Rob Dunbar, of Stanford University. I believe it was held in the Galapagos Islands not long ago. Professor Dunbar talks about sea level rise, ocean warming and about what “frightens [him] […]
Exuberant Poverty
By Daniel de la Calle After the film festival in Iraquara and a few days in Salvador I have kept making my way up north along the Brazilian coastline. The days in Salvador were intense and full. That city feels deeply African. The beautiful and graceful black people, the descendants of the slaves brought by […]
South of Africa
A couple weeks ago we had several screenings at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. Thanks to the efforts from the Sustainable Seas Trust, Andreas Spath with his While You Were Sleeping team, and Tessa Hempson from the University of Cape Town it was a great success that even took them by surprise. […]
For Sleepless Nights
Sven always forwards me things he thinks might interest me or help me do my job at Niijii Films, but above all we keep each other informed of the latest cycling news. He was the first one to congratulate me on Alberto Contador winning his third Tour de France. Three weeks ago he innocently emailed […]
Stirring it up on the West Coast
In our last entry, we were touring the gold mining town of Nevada city in our new t-shirts, sporting the logo “make films, not war”. This was during the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, just east of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. An established environmental film festival, it brings […]
Gatherers
By Daniel de la Calle Oyster and other shellfish farmers have been severely hurt by the recent tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico. Buyers have turned their eyes to the West Coast to purchase these foods, originally a staple of our past as hunters and gatherers, but unfortunately, small companies like Taylor Shellfish Farms in […]
Strange Demand
By Daniel de la Calle Hello Everybody, My name is Daniel de la Calle and I was the production photographer in “A Sea Change”. Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby recently asked me to continue collaborating by working on the website, so I hope to write some posts over these upcoming months. Today I was feeling […]
10 Good News, 10
By Daniel de la Calle It might be the cosmetic work of politicians, it may be hard to see the good side of it, could even leave you a bit confused, but here are 10 pieces of news that could ignite (emissions free, of course) true, authentic change: 1 Britain decides to stop airport growth around […]
Glasgow Screening
This report from Scotland comes from Ruth Carruthers, who organized a screening of ASC at the University of Glasgow. “I am pleased to announce that last nights screening of A Sea Change at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, was a great success. Although the film was hosted by the university’s Zoological Society the screening attracted […]
Summer Winds
By Daniel de la Calle Over twenty years ago I saw my first wind farm around the Gibraltar Strait. I was going with my parents and brothers to the town of Tarifa, on the Cádiz coast, “the windsurfing capital of the world” as they called it back then. Tarifa has a much higher suicide rate […]
An Understanding Review from Orion
From the January, 2010 issue of Orion Magazine A Sea Change A Film By Barbara Ettinger Niijii Films, 2009. $24.95, 81 minutes. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote, “I was born a naturalist.” From a young age he was fascinated by every aspect of nature. In the opening scene of A Sea Change, a film […]
Heinz Awards 2010
By Daniel de la Calle In a case of unprecedented coincidence, two of this year’s Heinz Awards winners are very closely related to A Sea Change and Ocean Acidification. Richard Feely, one of our favorite NOAA scientists, and Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker journalist that wrote the article “The Darkening Sea” that inspired the film […]
Teaching Moments
By Ben Kalina It’s been two years now since we filmed A Sea Change along the northern California coast and the journey continues with screenings scheduled globally as we plan another celebration of World Ocean Day in early June. As if ocean acidification wasn’t enough and we needed another reason to wean ourselves quickly from […]
Anthropocentric Geoengineering!
By Daniel de la Calle If there is one possible scenario that frightens me more than our current lack of action to stop the countless maladies we are inflicting upon the planet it is this very tempting flight forward casino gamble of geoengineering. Just two unoriginal thoughts I want to throw out there: No scientist […]
Into the Cerrado
By Daniel de la Calle The screening in Goiania marked the beginning of my last week in Brazil. I sped up the visits to the açai na tigela parlor, tried to look more closely at plants in the parks and to spot all the macaques on the electric wires; ay! so many things I would […]
The “Oceans Are Talking” CD is out
Congratulations, Sam, on a great video (below), and many fantastic songs for us all to enjoy on your new CD, “Oceans Are Talking.” Sam has included a catchy tune called Pteropods, inspired by A Sea Change. The CD is available in our store on our website. You are amazing, Sam. Thank you!
Audience Award
Earlier this week A Sea Change won the Best World Documentary Audience Award at the Sedona International Film Festival. Ever since the FICA Film Festival in Brazil in June of 2009 our documentary has won numerous prizes, but I am sure that this one is particularly meaningful for Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby; we are […]
Lazaro Ramos
By Daniel de la Calle One of the things that worry me the most when I do the screenings or talk to people here in Brazil is that it feels I am preaching amongst believers. The vast majority of Brazilians that do not know about Ocean Acidification, the ones that do not care about or […]