Viewing: September 09,2026
Join us Wednesday, September 9th at 7:00 p.m. as we begin our 14th annual Sustainability Film Series with a fantastic documentary featuring the environmental activism efforts of legendary folk musician Pete Seeger!
Admission is FREE – Tickets are required
This event will include a Q&A with filmmakers Jodie Childers and Dan Messina!
Local musician Steve Zarate will be performing songs by Pete Seeger in The Athena lobby from 6:20 p.m. until the 7:00 p.m. showtime
About the film
In the 1960s, the iconic American folk singer Pete Seeger devised an audacious plan—to build a sailboat to save the polluted Hudson River. But the Clearwater was not just a beautiful wooden vessel; it was also a movement, intersecting environmentalism, civil rights, and antiwar activism.
An intimate portrait of Pete and the grassroots community he anchored in the Hudson Valley for over forty years with his wife Toshi, Down by the Riverside shows how an unconventional campaign to save a beloved American waterway prompted a green revolution.
As the globe confronts a seemingly insurmountable climate crisis, this film is a parable for our time that offers hope for the next generation, revealing the potential of imagination, music, and participation to transform the planet.
About the filmmakers
Jodie Childers is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in NYC and Charlottesville, VA, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. She produced The Other Parade, and she directed and shot Down by the Riverside, which premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival. Her writing has been featured in American Quarterly, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Comparative American Studies, The Conversation, Jacobin, Transatlantica, The Pittsburgh Review of Books, Boulevard, and The Hopkins Review, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College.
Dan Messina is a showrunner, director, and editor with twenty years of experience in nonfiction film and television. He directed the documentary feature Down by the Riverside, which premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival, and The Other Parade, which screened at Frameline and was broadcast on RTE. Dan is currently the showrunner for the hit series The Real Murders of Atlanta on Oxygen. He also executive-produced Women on Death Row for A&E, and he has served as showrunner, producer, and editor for shows on Discovery+, National Geographic, Investigation Discovery, and OWN, among others.
Check out the rest of our line-up of Sustainability Films
The series is made possible thanks to the support of: University Libraries, Honors Tutorial College, Office of Sustainability, and The Voinovich School’s Environmental Studies Program.
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