SXSW: Our Future Stars in "The City Dark"

In 2008, for the first time in the history of mankind, the number of people living in urban areas eclipsed the number of those living in rural areas. This got filmmaker Ian Cheney thinking about the stars, and light pollution. He began with a simple question, “Why do we need the stars?” His ensuing documentary “The City Dark” is a poetic exposition of the disappearing night sky, increasingly illuminated by the cities of the world.

Cheney, best known for his documentary “King Corn,” is based in Brooklyn, but he grew up in rural Maine and spent his boyhood as an amateur astronomer, attending astronomy camps and building his own telescope. His approach to the topic is ambivalent, full of affection for both the stunning starry sky of his youth and the emerging “glittery globe.”

In six chapters, with an eclectic cast of scientists, philosophers (including Ann Druyan, co-writer of "Cosmos" and wife of the late Carl Sagan), historians and lighting designers, the film weaves together cutting-edge science with personal, meditative sequences reflecting on the human relationship to the sky. Astronomers in Hawaii track the threat of killer asteroids, and their work is increasingly more difficult through the thickening fog of light pollution. Biologists along the Florida coast trace the death of thousands of hatching sea turtles due to their disorientation by Miami’s lights. A generation of kids in places like the Bronx grows up with only a dozen stars and a vague notion of the Milky Way and the universe.

“The City Dark” strives for a balance of light and dark, and throughout the film is a refrain best articulated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Queens-born astrophysicist (you might recognize him from “The Colbert Report”): “When you look at the night sky, you realize how small we are within the cosmos. It’s kind of a resetting of your ego. To deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwittingly…is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.”

The documentary premiered at SXSW, and it will screen again Friday, March 18, 4:30 at Alamo Lamar South. This is certainly a film best experienced in the theater — or an observatory.