GASLAND

The Billion Dollar Energy Industry has a Dirty Little Secret. In September 2006, theatre director and part-time banjo player Josh Fox received an unexpected letter: a natural gas company offering him $100 000 for permission to explore his family's upstate New York property, in the lush Delaware River Basin area. Rather than simply signing on the dotted line, Josh's curiosity saw him asking questions. After some investigation, he discovered that the method for extracting the valuable resource from the "Saudi Arabia" of reserves, hydraulic fracturing, is exempt from several important pieces of federal legislation, including the clean water act. As Josh sets out on a journey across America's heartland, his personal concerns quickly uncover global ones: the multi-million dollar business of fracking has contaminated the water supply, the corporate giants are in cover-up mode, and the PR-spun government has not only turned a blind eye, but has regulated itself out of the picture...Rough-hewn yet poetic, the film is a desperate plea for scrutiny of a powerful industry that has now turned its eyes on a new, massive and (for now) largely unexplored territory: Australia.