Public Trust tries to reorganize the coalitions around protecting public lands in the US. Patagonia and Robert Redford produced this canny documentary in the fall of last year (I’m writing about this movie nearly six months late in Feb 2021), and I had a chance to see it at an early screening, because Friend’s excellent short film was the opener. The main strategy that documentarians use in this film is to talk to salt of the earth ranchers, libertarian muckrakers, and the chill son of a legislator in order to shift the Overton Window about the sort of people who stand for conservation. Hearing conservatives and Republicans talk about how cutthroat mega corporations squeeze poor farmers brings in some new and surprising perspectives, and sitting on the other side of the 2020 election makes this profile feel like even more of an artifact of the previous Administration.
