Celebrating the 'Thoreau of the American West'

The sentence at the top of the Facebook page for Wrenched tantalizingly summarizes its subject. It reads: 'How Edward Abbey lit the flame of environmental activism and gave the movement its soul.'

The 92-minute feature documentary, screening Sunday May 4th at the Santa Fe Film Festival together with Belgian short My Forest, would seem to be the kind of project that a fellow activist would be at the helm of. Sure enough, director-producer M.L. Lincoln is an individual interested in effectuating positive change:

Lincoln has been an activist since her late teens on the east coast. She attended film school in LA, and worked on productions at the American Film Institute.

In the late 90s she worked at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography and founded the acclaimed "More Exposure Project" which taught photography to at-risk children. Her previousdocumentary, Drowning River, celebrates the environmental activism of 1950s starlet Katie Lee. It tells the story of this feisty woman's 50-year battle against the Arizona politics and corporate agendas which "murdered" her beloved Glen Canyon. The concept for the film grew out of Lincoln's concern for the massive disappearance of wilderness and the wild rivers in the West.

Novelist Abbey, also sometimes referred to as the "Thoreau of the American West," passed away in 1989. The documentary takes its title from his celebrated comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Following this weekend's screening, Wrenched is set to move on to Telluride's Mountainfilm (May 23rd), the Sedona Film School (May 24th) and San Francisco's Green Film Festival (June 4th).

[Santa Fe Film Festival Wrenched review]