Meaningful Movies: John Lewis: Get In The Way

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Join Meaningful Movies Bellevue for the three-part series entitled Connectivity Project. Each of these programs examines the ripple effects of our actions in an interconnected world.

Meaningful Movies: Dammed to Extinction

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Join Meaningful Movies Bellevue for the three-part series entitled Connectivity Project. Each of these programs examines the ripple effects of our actions in an interconnected world.

Meaningful Movies: Mission: JOY

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Join Meaningful Movies Bellevue for the three-part series entitled Connectivity Project. Each of these programs examines the ripple effects of our actions in an interconnected world.

Meaningful Movies: Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line

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Please join Meaningful Movies Bellevue for the 2022 documentary Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line. Necessity is a powerful film following activists who enlist the “necessity” defense in a 2020 jury trial after being arrested for a direct action at Zenith Energy in Portland, Oregon. This story of climate resistance in the Pacific Northwest brings into view a historical landscape of tribal leaders, Indigenous activists, and white allies as they resist oil trains and trucks carrying highly inflammable products through protected waterways and treaty lands. In following the path of oil-by-rail and oil resistance along the Columbia River Gorge, the film revisits lessons of the New Deal era of building massive dams and what climate activists take from that era as they think about a Green New Deal.

Meaningful Movies: Overload: America’s Toxic Love Story

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Join Meaningful Movies Bellevue for our third screening of the fall. We will be showing Overload: America’s Toxic Love Story, a powerful documentary about the toxic chemicals impacting our public health and our environment. Soozie Eastman, daughter of an industrial chemical distributor, embarks on a journey to find out the levels of toxins in her body and explores if there is anything she or anyone else can do to change them. With guidance from world-renowned physicians and environmental leaders, interviews with scientists and politicians, and stories of everyday Americans, Eastman uncovers how we got to be so overloaded with chemicals and explores whether there is anything we can do to take control of the exposure. She’s determined to find out: Can we hit the reset button, or is it too late?

Meaningful Movies: Blind Trust: Leaders & Followers in Times of Crisis

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You’re invited to our first screening of 2023 when we will be showing Blind Trust: Leaders & Followers in Times of Crisis! This 2022 film celebrates the life and unique work of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Vamik Volkan, a psychiatrist who brings enemy groups together for dialogue in traumatized areas of the globe. Born on the ethnically-divided island of Cyprus, Volkan has spent a lifetime bringing enemy groups together for dialogue, and developed a new method of diplomacy based on the emotional life of nations. Plan to stay for the lively discussion that follows immediately after the film. Grab a snack, bring your family and friends and join this family-friendly screening!

Meaningful Movies: Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World

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Join us for a screening of Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World, a powerful documentary about five Native American communities as they restore their traditional land management practices in the face of a changing climate. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. The five stories include sustaining traditions of Hopi dryland farming in Arizona; restoring buffalo to the Blackfoot reservation in Montana; maintaining sustainable forestry on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin; reviving native food forests in Hawaii; and returning prescribed fire to the landscape by the Karuk Tribe of California. We’ll have a lively discussion immediately after the film, so grab a snack and join this family-friendly screening! See you at the movies!

Meaningful Movies: All Light, Everywhere

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All Light, Everywhere is an exploration of the shared histories of cameras, weapons, policing and justice. As surveillance technologies become a fixture in everyday life, the film interrogates the complexity of an objective point of view, probing the biases inherent in both human perception and the lens. We’ll have a lively discussion immediately after the film, so plan to join us.

Meaningful Movies: The Waiting Room

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The Waiting Room lays bare the struggle and determination of both a community and an institution coping with limited resources and no road map for navigating a health care landscape marked by historic economic and political dysfunction. It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans. We’ll have a lively discussion immediately after the film, so plan to join us.

Meaningful Movies: Agritopia

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Join Meaningful Movies Bellevue as it screens Agritopia: Rundown Apartments Reborn as Food Forest Cohousing Village. Agritopia shows what imagining a new way of living can do as we learn how Ole and Maitri Ersson turned a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, into a permaculture co-living space and urban food forest. The Ersson’s and other community members transformed a parking lot and overgrown yard into Kailash EcoVillage, a model for sustainable living that includes cohousing and organic gardening. Come and learn about the inspiring steps Kailash EcoVillage has taken to develop a lifestyle that can heal our environment and provide people with an alternative way of living. This screening will be the last of our shows before we take a summer break, so don’t miss out. Be sure to attend this family-friendly event!

Meaningful Movies: Can You Hear Us Now?

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Small-town activism. Nail-biting elections. A last-minute power grab. In Wisconsin, where extreme partisanship has become the norm, voters are finding their lives increasingly irrelevant to state lawmakers. Through the stories of four tireless women fighting to have their voices heard, Can You Hear Us Now? unravels the ways that years of one-party control reshaped democracy in a state at the center of American politics.
A riveting film from Bullfrog Films, Can You Hear Us Now? is 87 minutes long, so grab a snack and drink. The film will be followed by a lively discussion session with attendees sharing their points of view about the film.

Meaningful Movies: DamNation

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Three years ago, Felt Soul Media filmmakers Ben Knight and Travis Rummel along with a Stoecker Ecological fish biologist and underwater photographer, Matt Stoecker, embarked on a journey to document the environmental impacts of dams across America. In their feature length documentary, they weave together stories of pristine rivers, age old salmon, cement walls and the people whose lives are bound together by the flowing water. Visually stunning and powerfully eye opening, DamNation documents the attempt to reverse a century's worth of land and water management mistakes. A powerful documentary from Bullfrog Films, DamNation is 87 minutes long, so grab a snack and drink. The film will be followed by a discussion session with attendees sharing their points of view about the film.

Meaningful Movies: Behind the Shield

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Come one, come all – grab some popcorn and watch Behind the Shield from MediaEd Foundation. In this film, Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin looks at the myth that the NFL was not involved in politics. Zirin digs into decades of league history tracing the guise of “sticking to sports.” This case study reveals how the power of American football has managed to spread false information about topics including the sanctioning of certain ideas about gender roles, systemic racism, and patriotism. At the same time, Behind the Shield documents the role of activist athletes, even before Colin Kaepernick and other Black NFL players took a knee. Join us and learn about numerous players’ challenges to change an unjust status quo in order to create a different, more democratic America.

Meaningful Movies: The If Project

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Join Meaningful Movies Bellevue’s first screening of 2024! We will be showing The If Project, a feature-length documentary that explores the reasons why women are the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population, increasing at nearly double the rate of men since 1985. The film follows a group of inmates incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center for Women. These women are part of a writing workshop cofounded by Seattle Police Detective Kim Bogucki and former inmate Renata Abramson. Now a thriving non-profit organization, The If Project serves justice-involved individuals and their families. Plan to join via Zoom to find out what the “If” question is all about!

Meaningful Movies: Evergreen

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In February, Meaningful Movies Bellevue will screen Evergreen, from Bullfrog Films. In this film, we meet Marianne Edain and Steve Erickson, who have worked continually to retain the rural character and ecological diversity of Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, just north of Seattle. Through their organization Whidbey Environmental Action Network (WEAN), Edain and Erickson have monitored county applications for development and logging; challenged projects that violate state environmental law and led the way in science-based environmental public policymaking. In partnership with citizens and communities up and down Whidbey Island, they have helped keep trees standing and protected sensitive island ecosystems. Join us for this inspiring film and learn what is happening right here in Puget Sound to help protect our natural world. Plan to join via Zoom to find out what you can do to help support this work!