The Unforeseen

The American dream of owning a house with a white picket fence goes head-to-head with environmental sustainability in this urgent, beautifully crafted documentary. When an ambitious real estate developer sets out to transform thousands of acres of pristine hill country around Austin, Texas into a suburban development threatening a nearby natural spring and local treasure the community fights back. In the conflict that ensues, we see in miniature the struggle between development and preservation that today plays out in cities and towns across the country. A work of stunning visual beauty and epic scope, The Unforeseen is a grand meditation on the destruction of the natural world in pursuit of an often fleeting dream. (New Yorker Films)