Fuel
Thursday, September 2
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Director Josh Tickell takes us along for his 11 year journey around the world to find solutions to America’s addiction to oil. A shrinking economy, a failing auto industry, rampant unemployment, an out-of-control national debt, and an insatiable demand for energy weigh heavily on all of us. Fuel shows us the way out of the mess we’re in by explaining how to replace every drop of oil we now use, while creating green jobs and keeping our money here at home. The film never dwells on the negative, but instead shows us the easy solutions already within our reach.

No Impact Man
Monday, June 14
7:00 PM
Hooked on Colfax
3215 E. Colfax Ave, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year.

It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator. It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, busses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no garbage.

No problem – at least for Colin – but he and his family live in Manhattan. So when his espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping wife Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No Impact Project has an unforeseen impact of its own.

Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s film provides an intriguing inside look into the experiment that became a national fascination and media sensation, while examining the familial strains and strengthened bonds that result from Colin and Michelle’s struggle with their radical lifestyle change.

Consume this Movie!
Thursday, June 10
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Are Americans too materialistic? Are we willfully trashing the planetary ecology in order to serve the desires and drives of the ego? And what, or who could be driving this powerful force of seduction? Consume This Movie takes a critical look at social injustice, peak oil, resource depletion and our deep need to feel connected to each other through what we choose to consume. This 80 minute documentary also examines the frenzied pace of fast-lane materialism that is beggining to burn us out. We Americans are just now beginning to yearn for a simpler life, but is it too late? Have we set in motion a runaway train that threatens to undermine the ecological, social and spiritual cornerstones that make the pursuit of happiness possible in the first place?

The End of the Line
Monday, April 19
7:00 PM
Hooked on Colfax
3215 E. Colfax Ave, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Sound the global alarm. Scientists predict that if we continue fishing at the current rate, the planet will run out of seafood by 2048 with catastrophic consequences. Based on the book by Charles Clover, The End of the Line explores the devastating effect that overfishing is having on fish stocks and the health of our oceans.With Clover as his guide, Sundance veteran Rupert Murray (Unknown White Male) crisscrosses the globe, examining what is causing the dilemma and what can be done to solve it. Industrial fishing began in the 1950s. High-tech fisheries now trawl the oceans with nets the size of football fields. Species cannot survive at the rate they are being removed from the sea. Add in cofactors of decades of bad science, corporate greed, small-minded governments, and escalating consumer demand, and we’re left with a crisis of epic proportions. Ninety percent of the big fish in our oceans are now gone.Murray interweaves glorious footage from both underwater and above with shocking scientific testimony to paint a vivid and alarming profile of the state of the sea. The ultimate power of The End of the Line is that it moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer real solutions. Chillingly topical, The End of the Line drives home the message: the clock is ticking, and the time to act is now.

Split Estate
Thursday, April 22
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Imagine discovering that you don’t own the mineral rights under your land, and that an energy company plans to drill for natural gas two hundred feet from your front door. Imagine having little recourse, other than accepting an unregulated industry in your backyard. Split Estate maps a tragedy in the making, as citizens in the path of a new drilling boom in the Rocky Mountain West struggle against the erosion of their civil liberties, their communities and their health.

Zeroing in on Garfield County, Colorado, and the San Juan Basin, this clarion call for accountability examines the growing environmental and social costs to an area now referred to as a “National Sacrifice Zone.”

This is no Love Canal or Three Mile Island. With its breathtaking panoramas, aspen-dotted meadows, and clear mountain streams, this is the Colorado of John Denver anthems — the wide-open spaces that have long stirred our national imagination.

Exempt from federal protections like the Clean Water Act, the oil and gas industry has left this idyllic landscape and its rural communities pockmarked with abandoned homes and polluted waters. One Garfield County resident demonstrates the degree of benzene contamination in a mountain stream by setting it alight with a match. Many others, gravely ill, fight for their health and for the health of their children. All the while, the industry assures us it is a “good neighbor.”

Ordinary homeowners and ranchers absorb the cost. Actually, we all pay the price in this devastating clash of interests that extends well beyond the Rockies. Aggressively seeking new leases in as many as 32 states, the industry is even making a bid to drill in the New York City watershed, which provides drinking water to millions.

As public health concerns mount, Split Estate cracks the sugarcoating on an industry touted as a clean alternative to fossil fuels, and poignantly drives home the need for real alternatives.

If you want to understand the global economic system this film is a must see. It specifically deals with the work that women do and how it is measured (or not measured) in the present day economic system. In examining this issue Marilyn Waring also gives us a critical look into the distorted logic that drives the world today.

Fierce Light
Wednesday, February 24
7:00 PM
SAME Cafe
2023 E. Colfax Ave, Denver
$5 suggested donation or 1 hour volunteer

The 2006 murder of friend and fellow media-activist Brad Will in protest-torn Oaxaca, Mexico, is the impetus for Ripper’s journey, which takes him to the flash points  of spiritual activism around the world, including Montgomery, Alabama; Robben Island, South Africa; Andrah, India; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and South Central Los Angeles, where a months-long protest against the razing of a vital community garden provides a highly dramatic spine for the wide-ranging film.

En route, Ripper encounters a number of eloquent icons, including American Civil Rights legend Congressman John Lewis, actor turned activist Daryl Hannah, Nobel prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Alice Walker, Buddhist peace activist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, famed tree sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, and dharma punk, Noah Levine, South Central Farmers; Visionaries.

Ripper discovers what Paul Hawken (author “Blessed Unrest”) describes as the largest global movement in history - thousands of individuals and organizations connected by a shared commitment to compassionate, positive action.

Alice Walker calls it “a human sunrise” - Ripper calls it “Fierce Light.” With stunning cinematography, a compelling soundtrack, and dramatic stories of resistance and transformation, FIERCE LIGHT: When Spirit Meets Action reveals what is possible when human beings, faced with a world in crisis, rise to their absolute best.

Collapse
Thursday, January 14
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver
$5 suggested donation
or 1 hour volunteer

Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new President will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil, and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and to hope for the best. But is anyone prepared for the worst?

Michael Ruppert is a different kind of American. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, he predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter From the Wilderness at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial.

Chris Smith has always had a feeling for outsiders in films like American Movie and American Job. In Collapse, Smith stylistically departs from his past films by interviewing Ruppert in a format that recalls the work of Errol Morris and Spalding Gray. Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation. He is especially passionate over the issue of peak oil, the concern raised by scientists since the 1970s that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel. While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesnt hold back at sounding an alarm. He portrays a future that resembles apocalyptic science fiction. Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded; and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism. Smith lets viewers form their own judgments.

ArgusFest 6th Annual
Fair Trade Holiday Bazaar
w/ Art, Music, & Culture to
Help End Poverty
Sunday, December 6
1:00 to 4:30 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver

Do your holiday shopping with a clean conscience. Join ArgusFest at our 6th Annual Fair Trade Holiday Bazaar.

The event will feature vendors offering fair trade gifts, many of which whose sales help support organizations working to reduce conditions of poverty. Throughout the day we will feature live music, film, poetry, and education about poverty issues.

Vendors include:

- Cruelty Free World

- Emergency USA

- People of Hope Crafts

- Ladies Sewing Circle

- Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center

- Bead for Life

- Pachyderm Power

- and more…

If you are interested in becoming a vendor please contact Jason Bosch at 303-669-7286.

More details coming soon…

A River of Waste
Thursday, November 12
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver

A RIVER OF WASTE exposes a huge health and environmental scandal in our modern industrial system of meat and poultry production. Some scientists have gone so far as to call the condemned current factory farm practices as “mini Chernobyls.” In the U.S and elsewhere, the meat and poultry industry is dominated by dangerous uses of arsenic, antibiotics, growth hormones and by the dumping of massive amounts of sewage in fragile waterways and environments. The film documents the vast catastrophic impact on the environment and public health as well as focuses on the individual lives damaged and destroyed.