Josh Fox is the first to admit he wandered into documentary making as a total ingénue. On the eve of his visit to Australia to promote Gasland, which has won awards all over the world, including the prestigious Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize, Fox says he shot hundreds of hours of footage and could have kept going for years.

“So many people out there wanted to tell their story,” he explains. “We had enough material to make six films.”

A theatre director described by Time Out New York as "one of the most audacious auteurs" working on the contemporary stage, Fox also became a committed environmentalist by accident.

In 2008 he received an offer from a gas company, which wanted to lease his family’s land in Milanville, Pennsylvania. Following his nose, the banjo-toting Fox took off an investigative road trip across America, which took him deep into the dark heart of America’s fossil industry – an industry he says is behaving “like a desperate crack addict.”

“Once I realised that America has been taken over by a mono-culture based on cheap energy, and what this has already done to our rivers and our people, there was really no going back.”

Gasland reveals some very ugly facts about what is called “gas fracking”, and the almost entirely unregulated business of natural gas extraction in America. It’s an industry described in the film as “messy as a teenager’s bedroom.” But Gasland is also an entertaining and very personal odyssey of discovery, which hinges on Fox’s childhood in an idyllic forest.

“The root of my being is that land,” he says, “and although I don’t have children, I have always pictured myself showing them all the beauty in nature. Making this film I realised that if that goes, you can’t get it back.”

Fox is in Australia to promote the film and look into our own natural gas industry. He’ll present a special screening for the Total Environment Centre on 11 November 2010 at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington, Sydney. The evening is a fundraiser for TEC’s Don’t Frack the Gas Out of Us campaign. The first of it’s kind in Australia, it has been organised to stimulate debate about this controversial industry. Many Australian cities are in the same position as New York in the film – heavily reliant on a water catchment area outside the city’s boundaries, which could be utterly compromised if not carefully protected.

“Cities need to participate in keeping the countryside clean,” says Fox, who spent months with rural communities whose concerns about water contamination and loss of habitat had been repeatedly ignored in the rush to make money from natural gas.

“The culture of corporate dominance is about convenience, not quality of life,” he points out. “There is currently no branch of medicine which deals with chemical contamination. So when people go to the doctor with diseases that can’t be quantified, no one can help them. These are people with chemicals in their lungs and brains from breathing gas they couldn’t see.”

For Fox, who is already planning Gasland 2, the issue of preserving our natural resources is more important than almost anything else he can think of.

“I want to inherit something that no-one can own,” he says simply. “You can’t purchase a healthy river or a stream. It’s worth far more than dollars can buy.”

Trailer – Gasland The Movie

The Australian Premiere season of GasLand commences November 18 at the following cinemas:

• BRISBANE: Palace Barracks Cinema (61 Petrie Terrace, Brisbane)
• SYDNEY: Palace Verona Cinema (17 Oxford St, Paddington); Palace Norton Street Cinema (99 Norton St, Leichhardt)
• MELBOURNE: Palace Cinema Como (Cnr Toorak Rd & Chapel St, Sth Yarra); Cinema Nova (380 Lygon St, Carlton)
• ADELAIDE: Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas (250 Rundle St, Adelaide)
• PERTH: Luna Leederville Cinema (155 Oxford St, Leederville)
• HOBART: State Cinema (375 Elizabeth St, North Hobart)

For more information about the Total Environment Centre (TEC) and the various campaigns they are undertaking, check out the new TEC website!

Written by Ruth Hessey
Ruth is the Communications Director of the Total Environment Centre and has been a film critic for over fifteen years.

All images courtesy of Gasland.