Last night at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, the Hudson Valley Film Commission presented a screening of the National Geographic special called “Human Footprint.”

This was a big deal because the Film Commission helped the production shoot the movie all over the Hudson Valley using cast, crew, materials and more. So the Theater was packed full of people who not only saw themselves in the movie, but saw their hard work on the screen. It airs on National Geographic Channel at 9 p.m. Sunday night.

Basically, the film tries to give the viewer a visual representation of the amount of materials we consume in our lifetime. It followed a boy and girl from birth through retirement. So as a kid, you drink a lot of milk and they lay out all 13,056 pints you will drink in a lifetime (it covers almost an entire block). You’ll eat 19,826 eggs in your life, so they take that many and drop them on the floor in a rain of shell and yolk. On and on it goes. Everything from hamburgers, to fruit, soda, water (for showers, laundry, more), clothes, sneakers, hair care products, televisions, etc. You get the drift.

What the film does really well, besides drop jaws with its staggering numbers, is make people think about what goes INTO each product. So you’ll own 12 cars in your lifetime, on average. But where do all those parts come from? Even on an American car, parts are from all across the world and have to travel tens of thousands of air miles to get to the factory before you even see it on the lot. Or what about the hundreds of gallons of water used to process each and every t-shirt in the world? And that water then has to be cleaned, how much coal does that take?

I could go on and on and believe me, the film does. Almost too much. (It’ll run two hours on TV and the commercial breaks will be much needed from the barrage of information). But it’s still a highly recommended watch, even if you just glance at it for a few minutes.

Besides the local locations (it’s always weird watching a film in a shooting location, like Bearsville in this movie) and local actors (I was sitting behind the girl who played the female subject at the beginning) the film really makes you think about how much you as a person have an effect on the world.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under All, Film, Television, Woodstock Film Festival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.