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1 item from 2011

22 January 2011 2:42 PM, PST | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

Reviewed at the Sundance Film Festival 2011.

If you need something new to be incensed about, "The Last Mountain," a documentary directed by Bill Haney (of 2007's "The Price of Sugar"), will do the trick nicely. Its outrage of choice is mountaintop removal (Mtr) mining, the considerably controversial practice of deforesting and then dynamiting mountain ridges to extract coal seams, then piling everything back up in roughly the same shape -- except nothing ever seems to grow there again. Mtr is closely associated with Appalachia, and the film's primary battleground is Coal River Valley, Wv, where locals and activists gather to try to prevent Massey Energy, the country's fourth largest producer of coal, from mining Coal River Mountain.

If the issues were only environmental, "The Last Mountain" would be something of a familiar refrain, but the film has more up its sleeve than (to be sure, wrenching) helicopter shots of the »

- Alison Willmore

1 item from 2011