Selections From the 2025 Green Film Fest of San Francisco, Part 4
Dear Moviegoers,
For my first four movie reviews from the 2025 Green Film Festival of San Francisco, please visit part 1 here, American Dendrite here, and Outdoor School here. To learn more about the event and its screenings, visit the official website:
Diversity over riches. That's where true wealth can be found, according to the short documentary The Congress. This film doesn't really navigate the immensity of the issues facing indigenous people across the world today, but it does highlight a potnetial way of cutting through barriers and bridging conversation between cultures.
By letting people in. By giving their voices access.
Who knew?
Indonesia is home to thousands of individual cultures and communities, with their own land and their own groups of people. But, being spread far out over a near endless amount of islands, there's difficulty in communicating. And so, an AMAN, or "congress" organization was formed, that would bring together member cultures from across the region, to deliberate on anything and everything of concern, specifically to their indigenous populations.
A breath of fresh air for once in this overly political sphere we all live in, The Congress seems to respect conversation and representation over petty behavior and exploitative investment. Daring too, is its insistence on group conversation of straight up voting. This is a sticking point, as the movie flat out says how voting only leads to people being hurt, and not having their perspectives respected and considered. Of course, voting STILL occurs (raised hands and some yelling), making the process not as different as the movie may wish it to be presented as.
Despite this confusion, The Congress does make clear that having wide participation in legislative priorities isn't just key for agendas to be formed, but for being listened to by groups who otherwise didn't know that you existed in the first place.
It may not come off as a "green" film overall, but The Congress is about societal environments and humanity learning to work with each other. Call me silly, but I think that's nice. 3/5
It must be amazing to see what can happen in the great unknown, or to, perhaps, feel it. For an old man named Terry, an ex-Navy man and former Hell's Angels companion, knowing that feeling has meant more than the world he thought he knew could offer. An astounding revelation for anyone.
As suggested by its title The Last Dive, Terry, in his 80's, goes on a final diving expedition with his wife and a crew of fellow ocean romantics, not just to have fun and see what isn't always seen, but to find a friend that he hasn't visited in twenty some odd years. A Manta Ray he's named Willy, an animal that essentially chose him as a friend.
Banging on his boat, taking him for a deep dive ride, and lifting its wings to say hello, Willy took a man who's seen lots of tragedy and harm and changed his mindset in some most profound ways. Their relationship, while indescriable by a lot of standards, can be related to by even the coldest of hearts.
Made up of past adventures captured on VHS, tall tales and true legends told straight from Terry, and beautiful underwater footage, The Last Dive gets by on one man's final question and search for that answer at the end of his life, and then some. The film doesn't quite get cheesy or overly charming, though that's a bit built in by its very nature. And, if those things were to have become heavy, that still would've been fine. It would've been touching.
It WAS touching.
The Last Dive reminded me of a somewhat lesser version of Garrett Bradley's Time or even that Robin Williams movie The Final Cut, both due to their explorations into memory and expressions of waiting for something. For anything. For closure. Sometimes closure isn't what we're expecting. Sometimes we just have to take what we can get. Not eveyone gets a happy ending, but we do get to choose how its interpreted.
To pull that from any film is an extraordinarily mature feat. To learn that from a fish is life altering. Or maybe life affirming. 3.5/5
For more information on The Last Dive, visit its official website.