FUEL director Josh Tickell receives Biofuels Digest Award for Citizen of the Year
Biofuels Digest announced this morning that biodiesel promoter and filmmaker Josh Tickell received the 2008 Biofuels Digest Award for Citizen of the Year.
Tickell received the award in recognition of his pioneering plans to communicate the biodiesel story, and for his landmark documentary film “FUEL”, an update of the Sundance Award-winning “Fields of Fuel”.
The film charted Tickell’s decade-long quest to popularize biodiesel as he drove around America in his biodiesel-powered “Veggie Van”, and was recently updated to address the food vs. fuel controversy as well as explore algae as an advanced biofuel feedstock.
“While others have been shouting at Washington, the UN, or the rain, Josh Tickell has spent years promoting and popularizing biodiesel at the grassroots as an energy source,” said Biofuels Digest editor Jim Lane. “He has also made, in FUEL, a first-rate film that has made the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature. No individual could have done more to popularize new ideas about alternative energy.”
“Fields of Fuel” debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, received the Audience Award for Best Documentary Film. “May we work together to create a green and sustainable future,” Ticknell said in accepting his award. An entertaining backgrounder is available on Joshua Tickell, the “man who wanted to change the world one tank at a time,” whose decade-long involvement with biodiesel culminated in the award-winning documentary “Fields of Fuel”.
The film traces his story from a 25,000 mile odyssey of the “Veggie Van”, which was powered by used oil from fast-food franchises and home-brewed into biodiesel, to the making of the film.
Growing up amongst the oil refineries in Louisiana, Josh Tickell experienced the impacts of dirty oil processing at a young age. After watching members of his family suffer from pollution-related cancers, Tickell began a lifelong quest to find sustainable, clean energy sources.
In 1997, Tickell set out on the road with a biodiesel powered “Veggie Van” and a video camera and began filming what would eventually become known as FUEL, the 2008 Sundance Audience Award winning documentary film that investigates the possible replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy. Over the course of his 11 year journey, Tickell traveled the world going to over 25 countries, authored two books, founded a nonprofit organization, and jump-started America’s biodiesel movement.
Tickell’s Veggie Van Organization was selected by President Bill Clinton as an inaugural part of his Global Initiative on Climate Change. The organization serves to educate people about sustainable energy and provide pathways for integrating sustainable energy into homes, communities, cities, states and ultimately nations.
Reviewing the film, John Anderson of Variety said: “The films’ sentiments are clean and very, very green. Tickell knows how to grab an audience that’s either indifferent or disinclined to partake of the debate over America’s oil dependence and makes the substantial point that reliance on the Middle East and OPEC
makes the country more vulnerable than it would be if it moved into alternative fuels. “Oil is the
lifeblood of our society,” he says, before mounting a good argument about why that doesn’t
have to be.”
Tickell said of his documentary, “Ten years ago, when I set out to make this film, the biggest challenge I had was getting people to buy into the idea that a movie could make a significant contribution to the world.
Until recently, documentaries weren’t seen as vehicles for social change. That rapidly changed with
Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, Born into Brothels and especially with An Inconvenient Truth. Suddenly, the little energy documentary I’d been working on for a decade became hot.”
After winning the Audience Award at Sundance, the film’s producers and director made the decision to re-edit the film in light of the “food vs. Fuel” controversy that erupted in 2008.”
Tickell said: “The biggest challenge came after we won the audience award at Sundance. It was at that time that two camps emerged – those that loved biofuels and those that thought biofuels were awful. I made
the difficult choice to re-cut the movie to incorporate not just the controversy around biofuels, but also the other energy solutions that exist. Like any renovation, we started re-cutting with an eye toward repairing a few flaws and ended up knee deep in a complete re-edit. The film that emerged kept the heart of the original movie, but was different enough in content and scope that it merited a new name and a new launch. Hence FUEL was born. Everyone who has seen both films agrees that it was worth the risk, the time and the energy to make the new movie.”
The completed film includes among its many interview subjects: Sir Richard Branson, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sheryl Crow, Larry David, Hon. Jay Inslee, Vinod Khosla, Harrison Dillon, Willie Nelson, former National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Neil Yonug, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former CIA director Jim Woolsey, Julia Roberts, and Woody Harrelson.
The Sundance Film festival, which screened “Fields of Fuel”, was also host to a demonstration of algae-based biodiesel from Solazyme. The company had a demonstration car powered by its trademarked brand Soladiesel. Solazyme itself received the 2008 Biofuels Digest Achievement Award in Advanced Biofuels and Feedstocks.
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