Dirt! The Movie

Gene Rosow & Bill Benenson, Directors/Producers

● Environment
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DIRT! The Movie shows how modern methods of agriculture, mining practices and urban development have yielded catastrophic results: mass starvation, drought, floods and global warming. At the same time, the documentary uncovers surprising and empowering ways we can repair our relationship with dirt and create new possibilities for all life on earth.

From farmers and agronomists rediscovering sustainable agriculture, to scientists investigating techniques to generate electricity from soils and sediments, and inmates learning valuable job skills in a prison horticulture program, the filmmakers explore new ways to use and sustain this vital natural resource.

In this featured clip for telegraph21, prison inmates at Riker's Island in New York City tend the soil at an on-site nursery run by the Horticultural Society of New York.  The "Greenhouse Project" teaches the inmates valuable landscaping and gardening skills, and offers the opportunity for a paid internship upon release. 

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Gene Rosow (director/producer) is an accomplished filmmaker who has written, directed and produced more than twenty documentaries during his thirty-plus years in the industry. These include Doctora for England's Channel 4, Routes of Rhythm With Harry Belafonte for PBS and Knights for Canal + France. Rosow's feature film producing credits include Silent Tongue, Zeus and Roxanne, Britney Baby One More Time and others. Rosow has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also taught, and he spent a year doing post-graduate work at the University of Southern California in ecology, biochemistry, cellular physiology and parisitology.

In over thirty years of producing and directing, award-winning filmmaker Bill Benenson (director/producer) has made documentaries that include The Marginal Way (about the fishing and artist community of Ogunquit, Maine) and Diamond Rivers, a first-person account of diamond prospecting in northeastern Brazil. With Benenson Productions and its predecessor, BBZ Films, Benenson was a development executive, producer or executive producer on feature films including Under the Volcano, The Lightship and A Walk on the Moon. In addition, Benenson was executive producer on Mister Johnson.

Laurie Benenson (executive producer) is a writer, editor and journalist. She founded Movieline magazine in 1985 and went on to write about film and television for The New York Times. An avid environmentalist, Benenson is on the action forum of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is also involved with Rainforest Action Network and Conservation International, among other environmental groups. Laurie has written a screenplay about pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, and is currently working on a rewrite of her romantic comedy Genie. DIRT! The Movie is her debut as a producer.

Dirt! The Movie is available on DVD here: http://www.neoflix.com/store/COM93/

  • Learn about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and find a CSA near you: http://www.localharvest.org/csa
  • Learn about U.S. agriculture policy and how it affects your food choices and the quality of the food you eat. Visit the web site of the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture to learn about and/or fight for food-related legislation: http://sustainableagriculture.net/take-action/

Click on each image for a larger view.

  • Physicist/Environmentalist Vandana Shiva believes in soil not oil.
  • A street potter showing what he can do with dirt.
  • Wine expert Gary Vaynerchuck can taste terroir.
  • Wangari Maathai plants a tree.
  • Mushroom man Paul Stamets loves the smell of dirt.

Watch the Trailer:

Interview with Gene Rosow

t21: Why do you think most people see dirt as something unpleasant or "dirty"?
GR: One thought is that, the ground is where we bury people when they die for the most part. But also over the course of time and with greater rapidity, we are living in cities and we've become disconnected to soil. In the past, we were closer to it, and we also had a sense of what it was.

In every religion there is a sense of our origin from "dust to dust," that we come from dirt. I think we've lost that connection, both in the practical world as we've become more urban and industrialized, and in the spiritual world as we've become more disconnected from nature in almost every single way.

t21: How did you come up with the idea to make a film about dirt?
GR: I was working on another project with my producing/directing partner on this, Bill Benenson, when somebody gave us a book entitled Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, written by William Bryant Logan. This book was astonishing in many different ways. I used teach history at Berkeley. I had a period in my life where I hung my hat in the science area, and an early interest in the environment. This book also had a spiritual dimension and it spoke to every part of my being. At the end of the book, I never looked at the ground beneath my feet in the same way again.

Bill and I talked about how we could possibly turn this book into a film, not adapt it literally but really be something that inspired us. Neither of us had seen a film about dirt, and because it posed such unique challenges, we set out to do it. It was also a chance to make a film that really had a positive take on some of the problems we are facing. To say, there are solutions to really enormous problems and we'd like to show them to you.

t21: Were you surprised by any of the people you interviewed?
GR: Absolutely, as we were going along, we would find everything opened up a new way, even though we knew about the subject from reading it and working with soil. For example, the Riker's Island program has not only a redemptive affect for the soil, but for those who work with it, in this case inmates. It gives inmates a chance not just for busy work within this prison industrial complex but a chance to gain skills that will provide jobs (if we are able to fund the green jobs that we need to fund in order to survive).

t21: There is a man in the film who tastes dirt to determine how rich it is. Have you ever tasted dirt?
GR: Yes, absolutely. It tastes a little gritty but it has this really nice aroma to it. In my case, it was almost a little sweet and it may have been because I may have chomped on sprouts in there as well.

t21:How did you get Jamie Lee Curtis to narrate?
GR: She's a neighbor and she shared a carpool with Bill's daughter (Lori Benenson). She was talking to Bill and Lori, who is our executive producer, and we were looking for a narrator and Jamie Lee offered her talents.

t21:What was the hardest part of making this documentary?
GR: How do you take a subject such as soil and dirt and reach out to an audience to make it interesting? And, we wanted to reach out to the widest possible audience, not just an audience of committed environmentalists.

t21: What's your favorite part or scene in the film?
GR: It's the whole ball of wax, but without being unfair to anybody, I think the Riker's Island sequence in some ways, because the redemptive quality of what dirt offers is something that's open to a CEO of Monsanto or an inmate at Riker's.

t21: What are some things people can do to better understand the importance of dirt?
GR: First, go to see the movie and go to the website www.dirtthemovie.org. Then there are some practical ways, starting with raising awareness of the soil. We have to know it's even there and matters. Then it's understanding that trees in cities are important and it helps to plant them. People can actually have gardens no matter where they live and it doesn't matter whether it's herbs, vegetables, or flowers. Once that awareness builds it also should come to policy change. What's protecting soil? What are the issues?

t21: What's the one thing you hope people get out of this film after watching it?
GR: That you'll never look at the ground beneath your feet in the same way. You'll see that it's a living, breathing matrix that all life, not only our species, depends on and how we treat it is really how we treat ourselves.

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