 "Photo: Caleb Miller")
UT graduate film school alumna Laura Dunn was all set to venture to the Jordan River in Israel until she received a very special phone call. Already an acclaimed filmmaker with her documentaries on Louisiana's "Cancer Alley" and Yale's labor struggles under her belt, she had plans to investigate the controversies over water usage in the Holy Land. But a call from longtime Austinite and celebrated filmmaker Terrence Mallick changed all that. Mallick pointed out that Dunn happened to have controversy over water and development raging in her very own backyard. It was a story Mallick long thought deserved the feature documentary treatment, and he believed Dunn to be the right person to tell it.
"He said, initially, to try to see the whole world through a grain of sand," Dunn said.
So was born "The Unforeseen," Dunn's first full-length feature documentary. The film charts the struggle over Barton Springs in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, as charismatic developer Gary Bradley squares off against Austin's environmental movement.
For co-executive producer Robert Redford, who spent childhood summers in the Austin-San Marcos area with his grandfather, it's an issue that hits very close to
home indeed.
"I spent much of my young life here. Even though I grew up in Los Angeles, a lot of my introductions to the land and its natural resources began here," Redford said. "I learned to swim here. And the impact it had on me stayed with me into my adult life and impacted the citizen's work I did with the environment later on."
Redford continued to champion the preservation of Barton Springs, which made him a natural choice to help shepherd Mallick and Dunn's vision of a new kind of environmental documentary, a more thoughtful meditation on the conflict between the natural and unnatural worlds that would bypass a dry, facts-and-figures approach.
"In about 1989, I became aware of the struggle of a very few local people to try to ward off what looked like a Godzilla footprint on its way to Austin to develop an area," Redford said.
The ultimate goal was to craft a film that, while specifically addressing Austin, would speak to the more general battle over environmental issues across the world, using local issues as a launching pad for a deeper examination of the conflict between preservation and growth. Dunn conducted hundreds of interviews with various stakeholders in growth, development and the environment, combed the archives of the Austin History Center for relevant news and city council footage, and even climbed into a shark cage dangling from a crane to get a needed aerial shot of the Frost Bank Tower.
"It's a microcosm. Yes, it's about Austin, and yes, it's specific to Austin, but it has a far bigger ring to it," Redford said. "When it comes to what's going on, you can trade Austin for other communities in different states. The specificity of the film creates a kind
of power."
"The Unforseen" paints a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of much-reviled developer Gary Bradley, who
emerges from the film with all his attractive charisma and ambition intact. In its
willingness to give the pro-development side of the story a chance to explain itself, Dunn's film has attracted some criticism from local environmentalists. For her part, Dunn said the notion that she's succeeded in angering both sides makes her feel as though she's done her job as
a documentarian.
"I believe in the power of art to subvert people's expectations and to disorient them and make them see the world a little differently," Dunn said. "My hope would be that it would inspire those that have been at this for a long time, that it would reinvigorate some of the old guard who have really pioneered this fight to protect Barton Springs. And I also hope that it would inform the newcomers, that it would educate and inspire people to get engaged locally and just to participate in shaping the future of this community."
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