The first edition of the “Porquerolles film festival” dedicated to the environment and chaired by actress Juliette Binoche rewarded Thursday evening the film “Dark water” by Todd Haynes. The festival, organized outdoors from July 16 to August 20 at La Villa Carmignac, on the island of Porquerolles (Var), rewards a documentary or a fiction dedicated to environmental protection. He distinguished for this first year, "Dark water" which tells the true story of a lawyer fighting against the chemical giant DuPont, at the heart of a pollutants scandal.
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In the film, actor Mark Ruffalo plays lawyer Robert Bilott, who fought a long legal battle against DuPont on behalf of some 70,000 people whose drinking water had been contaminated with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in West Virginia. The jury chaired by Juliette Binoche, surrounded in particular by actor Charles Berling and photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, also awarded a special prize to “The tree of providence” by Belgian director Michel Hellas.
In this documentary, the journalist went in the footsteps of forgotten practices. In the past, certain trees were planted to promote the development of crops. Then the pesticides came, but these trees, which in a few years restore soils that had become unsuitable for agriculture, managed to resurface, as the film shows. More and more replanted in West Africa, these trees allow the poorest farmers to get by, thanks to agroforestry.
