Sundance Film Fest highlights “The Last Mountain”

The Sundance Film Festival, which was held January 20-30, featured an online side venture sponsored by Timberland. That mini-site has trailers for four films that the boot company especially wanted to highlight, and those four films vied for the title Timberland Flick Pick.

It’s there that you can get a peek at the documentary “The Last Mountain.” The movie lays out one battle taking place between coal and renewable energy in the U.S. The focus is a small valley in West Virginia where local grassroots activists are joined by outsiders including Robert Kennedy Jr. to take on the coal industry, a major employer in the region.

From what we see in the trailer, the movie spotlights in vivid emotion the ways that a company’s stakeholders wrestle for power and differing visions of the future. Activist Maria Gunnoe (above) puts it this way: “We live in a very intelligent country that has the ability to create energy without blowing up mountains.”

According to Indiewire.com, U.S. theatrical rights to the movie have have been acquired by Dada Films, which plans to bring the movie to theaters in the “top 20 U.S. markets” starting June 3. U.S. DVD rights were bought by New Video, which plans to offer the movie for sale shortly after the theatrical run.