Three diverse souls trying to save a world in Roshan's & Vaughan-Lee's ELEMENTAL

ELEMENTAL begins with a quote from T.S. Eliot, something to the effect that, by taking a risk, we learn just how far we can go. This new documentary then introduces us to three very different people, spread out around the globe -- in India, Australia and Canada -- intent on helping save our dying environment, each in his/her own special way.

Out of all the folk currently working to save our environment in countless different ways, how and why

filmmakers Gayatri Roshan (shown at right) and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee chose these particular three people seems to TrustMovies perhaps a little arbitrary. Ms Roshan is from India, as is her subject Rajendra Singh, who is intent on purifying (or at least cleaning up) the water of India's famous Ganges river. The movie begins, in fact, with spillage from a leather tanning factory polluting the Ganges.

Mr. Vaughan-Lee, the British filmmaker and musician/
composer shown at left, is the son of a Sufi mystic and has for some time been involved in projects to do with -- as is this one -- helping our world sustain itself.

This sustainability is also paramount in the minds of our three protagonists, the other two of whom include Eriel Tchekwie Deranger (shown below), a young woman of Native Canadian heritage, who -- via the Rainforest Action Network -- is fighting the Canadian Tar Sands development and the banks who are funding the project, and Jay Harman, a scientist/inventor from Australia who uses nature's own curling motion as a design to guide his projects into helping cool down the planet.

The work of Mr. Harman (the gentleman is shown below) proves the most exciting and unusual that the movie offers. We see a few of his projects, and each one -- dealing with the cleaning of water using that special spiral motion or with the movement of air and the possibility of removing pollution via nature's own special design -- seems not just possible but even probable.

The problem with the movie is that we just keep wanting more, but as soon as some thought or idea engages us -- wham: we're off to spend time with one of the other activists. This constant cutting between the three grows more tiresome and annoying as the movie proceeds because we're always left wanting more but getting less.

Why exactly has not Harman's projects taken off? The economic downturn, for one thing, but we come away from this film either suspicious or disappointed in how little we've really learned. While Ms Deranger proves the most interesting and accessible from the personal angle (she meets a very nice guy during her activism, and soon they are together and she's expecting, as shown below, his child), we keep learning just enough to want additional information. We're told that the Tar Sands project pits family against family and jobs against the environment (and is very much connected to our own proposed Keystone Pipeline)-- but the details that might better involve us are nowhere to be found.

Ditto Mr. Singh (below), whom we really learn the least about and who seems to flit from one place and project to another. At one point, the local people point out that so-called activists and government representatives come with promises but then leave without doing anything for the locals. What did Singh do in this particular place? We never learn the answer.

Both the film and its three interesting protagonists are worthy of our time, all right. But better use could have been made of that time. Any one of these activists and his/her work would easily fill up 90 minutes. Tossing them into a single film and then editing their information together into the shards seen here is not very edifying.

The oddly-titled Elemental, running 92 minutes, opens this coming Friday, May 17, in Manhattan at the Cinema Village, with a subsequent release planned for San Francisco, San Rafael, Portland, Bellingham, Austin and Washington DC -- with other cities to follow. The film is also available to bring to your city via tugg.

Lorenz Knauer's JANE'S JOURNEY concen-trates on the work of one hell of a woman

We get some up-close-and-personal information about Jane Goodall -- the British primatologist and anthropologist considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpan-zees -- in the new documentary about her that opens in New York this Friday and in Los Angeles, Friday next. But mainly what we see, hear and come to understand has much more to do with her work, early on with those chimps, and even more impor-tant, now, as she strives to save a dying planet and to bring us along with her on that mission.

Let's admit it right out: This film is hagiography of a sort. But when the folk around the subject at hand love and respect her as much as they clearly do, it's rather difficult not to present the woman as something special. Film-maker Lorenz Knauer (at left) and his crew have put together a nearly two-hour documentary about Ms Goodall that slips around the globe nearly as fast and often as the lady herself does it (she tells us at one point that she is rarely anywhere longer than three days at a time -- and this at age 77!). After a brief bit of early history, we learn of how she came to undertake, some fifty years ago, her pioneering study of wild chimpanzee behavior (below), and why her mentor Louis Leakey felt that a woman -- and a non-university-educated woman, at that -- would be best for this job.

The film begins as Goodall tells a very funny anecdote about Gorillas Get Me Pissed (oops, I got that title wrong) but in such a classy, gracious manner that you'll immediately be taken with the woman. And she holds you in this light, caring embrace throughout the film. We learn of her first and second marriages ("I chose two jealous men," she says) and the offspring of the first, nicknamed "Grubb," whom we eventually meet, along with his own offspring.

The scenes with the chimps, both the old and recent ones, are spectacular indeed, and the cinematography (above, by Richard Ladkani) and sound design are as good as anything we get from Hollywood blockbusters. The movie comes into its own after Ms Goodall goes to a particular seminar on chimps only to learn that in habitat after habitat, the animals are dying or being slaughtered. Overnight this seems to activate her "Activist" button, and since that time she has campaigned around the globe not only for safer animal habitats, but for the betterment of our planet and an end to its current destruction.

Of particular note is her work on American Indian reservations and her Root & Shoots program. We go from a fabulous and hidden "hippo pool" in Africa to the melting ice of Greenland; we hear celebs like Angelina Jolie and Pierce Brosnan talk about this untiring activist and her work. Best of all, we see this work in action and what it means. It will be almost impossible, I think, to come away from this film with anything less than supreme admiration for Ms Goodall and her work. The big question is, of course, how to wrest control of our planet from the individual and corporate wealth that currently controls and is destroying it -- so that Goodall's work can succeed and bear the kind of fruit that will count  Suggestions, anyone?

Jane's Journey, from First Run Features, opens this Friday, September 16, in New York City at the IFC Center, and on September 23 in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica 4.

All photos are from the film itself, except that of director Knauer, 

which comes courtesy of exposay.com