“Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time?”
ALBATROSS is a film about humanity told through the plight of a population of seabirds. It is a powerful visual journey into the heart of a gut-wrenching environmental tragedy. It is also a love story — a film that speaks to human emotion, challenging our complicity in the face of destruction and calling for a re-examination of the interconnected role we play within the global ecosystem.
Midway atoll, located in the middle of the remote North Pacific Ocean, is the farthest you can get from any continent on Earth. There, tens of thousands of Laysan albatross chicks lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic. Artist and filmmaker Chris Jordan first journeyed to Midway in 2009. He returned again and again over the course of eight years with his team, documenting the cycles of life and death, and capturing stunning and intimate portraits of these magnificent seabirds.
Chris’s images of dead seabirds with stomachs full of everyday household items are some of the most widely circulated and shocking depictions of the reality we now face, together, as a society addicted to a flawed material: plastic. He tells the story behind these images in ALBATROSS, a film that steps beyond the traditional model of a nature documentary and defines a category of its own.
In collaboration with Parley, Chris is now sharing ALBATROSS in the same way he says it came to him — as a messenger and a gift. The film makes its global debut as a public artwork, free of commercial profits.
And you’re invited to take part.
Beginning Earth Day, April 20, and continuing through World Oceans Day, June 8, ALBATROSS will be available for individuals to view and share by signing up to organize a screening.
Take part in the narrative, help shape the conversation, and be a part of the paradigm shift we need to reverse the trend of denial and destruction.
To host a screening, email screenings@albatrossthefilm.com
Here's what others are saying about ALBATROSS:
“Breathtaking beauty, being destroyed by humans”
- Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, Parley Collaborator
“There’s still hope, everyday the albatross are still alive there’s a chance for redemption”
- Dr. Sylvia Earle, oceanographer, Parley Collaborator
“I hate the fact that I feel so responsible for contributing to such destruction”
- Diego Luna, actor, Parley Collaborator
“The screening was absolutely amazing, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the future of this movie”
- Louie Psihoyos, filmmaker, Parley Collaborator
“Albatross is a spiritual experience that transcends the medium of film.”
- Joanna Macy, author
“Albatross is a piercing, soaring, sobering, exalting artwork, tinged with the sadness of great love, radiantly brilliant.”
- Carl Safina, conservationist and writer
“Transfixed, mesmerized, undone, astonished, stunned; even these words do not describe the experience of watching Albatross. It is poetry written at the end and beginning of the Earth, a radiant lens into innocence and suffering, a quintessential mirror of what it means to be humane in this world.”
- Paul Hawken, environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author
“Albatross is a shared grief, a collective prayer, a mirror into our own complicity of the suffering we have caused through our religion of consumption. Chris Jordan asks us through his lens of attention and compassion, ‘How shall we live?’ This film is a reckoning of this moment in time. Do we have the courage to not avert our gaze? Albatross shows us the way.”
- Terry Tempest Williams, author, conservationist, and activist.
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