THIS ONE IS BY ANA BEINHART

After the twelve hour journey beginning in an upstate New York snowstorm and ending in the surprisingly mild Park City resort town, I was finally ready to begin the Sundance experienece.
First things first, coffee. The offer of a walk to Starbucks gets me out of couch at around 8:30 in the morning and as my father and I walk towards our favorite beverages I start realize how excited I am to be here. We head towards the Holiday Village Cinema 4 to see “The Last Mountain” and when we arrive it turns out that the film actually started at 9 not 9:30 as the website stated. My father grabs the two tickets left for him by the publicist. Being late is clearly frowned upon and we’re told that the doors have already been closed and we will have to be cleared to be allowed inside. Finally we’re told that the manger of the theatre normally doesn’t let people in late but she’ll make an exception.
We take a seat in the front row and I lean my head back to watch the massive screen. We missed the introduction of the movie but I was immediately immersed in the movie anyway. The film focuses mainly on Coal River Valley, West Virginia, which is an extremely effective example of the devastating effects of mountain top removal. As I watched the film progress I met the people getting cancer from the pollution, saw their children getting asthma and being born with autism due to the greed of major corporations, I keep in mind that coal is being burned in 600 power plants across the country. The dangers of coal-fired power plants ARE close-to-home for all Americans, no matter where they live.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a powerful part of the fight to preserve the Appalachian mountains and stop companies like Massey Energy from destroying peoples homes, their health and most importantly, their futures. There’s a part in the film when Robert speaks about when the bulldozers came to build a road through the forest next to his childhood home. The animated movie called Fern Gully immediately came to mind, and the feelings I felt as a child about the loggers coming to cut down the rain forest. Every child knows that cutting down forests is wrong, burying streams and rivers is wrong, and blowing up the tops of mountains and leaving only leveled ground and lakes of toxic sludge behind, is definitely wrong.
There is no way that any person could truly think that there’s nothing wrong with what Massey Energy is doing to the planet and the people living on it. Greed is disgustingly unattractive, we know this, problem is it’s also a dangerous habit with massive amounts of collateral damage.
I’m not going to recap the film any more than I already have, all I am going to do is say that the 90 minutes you could spend watching this film would be well worth your time. There are many images that will stay with me; the coal miners fighting the protesters, trying to protect the jobs that are killing them, protecting the companies that pay them as little as possible and destroy the futures of their communities. The lakes of toxic sludge holding billions of gallons of harmful chemicals, sometimes even radioactive, in every state in this country. The faces of men making billions of dollars from the deaths of people and the steady decline of environmental health in this country and the world. The images that will stay with me the most though, are the faces of the people willing to stand up to big companies, corrupt politicians, and a world that often seems like it isn’t listening. My face rarely had time to dry throughout this film but I left feeling hopeful anyway.
We do have options, there are people who care, the future is ours to mold, and this film not only makes that apparent in the end, but can be used as a great tool to outline the possibilities to those unaware.