Seeing The Unforeseen at last years Human Rights Watch Film Festival reconfirmed for me how powerful documentaries can really be. Laura Dunn’s flawless portrait whisks you away to Austin, Texas directly into the murky battle between nature and ideas of development. The film follows a local developer, a legal battle over Austin’s beloved natural swimming spot Barton Springs and different families as they try to find affordable housing, often having to turn to new developments.

What makes the documentary stand out is that it shies away from being a film that simply makes the developer the bad guy. On the contrary, they film paints land developed Gary Bradley as a complicated man, who may have had a great vision but got lost somewhere along the way. What contrasted with the locals who try to save their clean swimming water, and families looking for good neighborhoods that they can actually afford, you get a very real picture of the problems and more importantly, why they exist.

I think Paul Fileri’s review in Film Comment got it right:

With her intelligent and formally accomplished debut feature The Unforeseen, Laura Dunn has shown herself to be up to the task, bringing clear-eyed reflection to bear on modern capitalism, urban development, and globalization, probing the systems of economic and social power that shape our everyday lives as well as our loftier sense of nature as a whole.

Beyond the content of the film, it should be brought up that it’s one of the best photographed documentaries to be released in some time. The images speak volumes about the issues at hand - adding a new layer of depth to the already thought provoking film. Not to mention that the film is produced by one of my favorite directors Terrence Malick, along with Robert Redford.

Folks living in NYC should take note that The Unforeseen is screening this Saturday night @ MOMA and opens here and other places on February 29th. You should watch the beautiful trailer below and then to learn more about the folks who are working to save Barton Springs.