The Unforeseen

USA 2007 / 93min.
Director Laura Dunn / Producer Doug Sewell, Jef Sewell, Laura Dunn

The American Dream of owning a house goes head to head with
environmental sustainability in debut director Dunn’s stunningly
lyrical and beautifully crafted documentary The Unforeseen. The transformative viewing experience is co-produced by Robert Redford and explores the unseen relationships between our natural environment and our urge to destroy it.

The former farm boy now successful real estate developer has transformed 4000 pristine acres into Texas’s largest and fastest-selling subdivisions but when the development threatens the local limestone aquifer and a natural springfed swimming hole, the community fights back.

In the ensuing conflict, we see in miniature a struggle that today plays out in communities across the world.

Observing locally and thinking globally, this is a tale of personal hopes, victories and failures; a series of debates over land, economics, property rights and the public good; a meditation on the exchange of our irreplaceable natural resources for an often fleeting dream of making it big.

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