6th GREEN FILM FESTIVAL OF SAN FRANCISCO:

Train Dreams

(Closing Night Film)

Set in the Pacific Northwest during the first decades of the 20th century, Jockey director Clint Bentley’s beguiling adaptation of Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson’s novella stars Joel Edgerton as a humble labourer immersed in a rapidly changing world of natural splendour and voracious industry. The film, which takes place from the end of Westward expansion through the 1960s, takes a look at the human toll on the natural world.

Train Dreams Filmmakers Clint Bentley and Joel Edgerton received the inaugural THR Trailblazer Award for Sustainable Storytelling last month at TIFF.

At the Toronto International Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter honored the filmmakers behind Train Dreams with the inaugural Trailblazer Award for Excellence in Sustainable Storytelling. The award, which recognizes visionary creators who illuminate our changing world, was presented to Bentley and Edgerton by Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.

For a film with a strong environmental message to be heard by the right people requires storytelling strategy, according to Edgerton, who also executive produces. “This idea within the film, which is sort of tons of messages about our relationship to the environment that we live in,” he says, adding that the characters “give a sense that we’re all interwoven, we’re all connected to each other. Whether it’s about friendship or kinship or humanity. There’s something there about that in the world we live in that isn’t all the movie’s about but it sort of resonates on another level throughout the story.”

“Train Dreams is a film that manages to explore the cost to a man’s soul of cutting down a 500-year-old tree, but also the lives that would be saved by forthcoming progress,” Read when presenting the award to Bentley and Edgerton. Read continued, “Train Dreams does a beautiful job of exploring that balance between progress and preservation.”

The Green Film Festival is presented by SF IndieFest, a 501c3 non-profit, that has presented over 60 film festivals over the past 27 years, acquiring a strong following with independent film fans and garnering press coverage and recognition for thousands of films and filmmakers. SF IndieFest is a founding member of the Film Festival Alliance.