“The kind of transformative viewing experience that has made the current period a golden age for nonfiction film.”
Robert Koehler, Variety
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A film by Laura Dunn Executive Produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford
The American dream of owning a house with a white picket fence goes head to head with environmental sustainability in this urgent, beautifully crafted documentary. When a ambitious real estate developer sets out to transform thousands of acres of pristine hill country in Austin, Texas into a suburban development – threatening a nearby natural spring – the community fights back. In the conflict that ensues, we see in miniature a struggle that is playing out in cities and towns across the country. Breathtaking in score, The Unforeseen questions what we’re willing to give up in the name of growth. 
“One of the great documentaries of our time, The Unforeseen is a rapturous nightmare.”
Chris Barsanti, Film Journal International
Featuring interviews with Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, the iconic Texas Governor Ann Richards, environmentalist Wendell Berry and many others.
ROBERT REDFORD
Growing up in the deteriorating sprawl of Los Angles, Robert Redford sought refuge in the lush landscapes of central Texas where he spent summers with his beloved grandfather. He learned to swim in Barton Springs and credits the rolling hills and area waters with first instilling in him a love for the natural world. In this film, he both reflects on the treasured memories of his childhood and articulates how this battle over a spring is a microcosm for communities everywhere struggling to protect their most precious natural resources from the unrelenting forces of short-term economic growth.
THE UNFORESEEN is a powerful meditation on the American dream – on the destruction of the natural world as it falls victim to the cannibalizing forces of unchecked development. It is an intricate tale of personal hopes, victories and failures; and of debates over land, water and the public good.
Winner, Truer Than Fiction award, Independent Spirit Awards, 2008
World Premiere, Sundance Film Festival, 2007
Official Selection, South by Southwest Film Festival, 2007
Official Selection, Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, 2007
Official Selection, Documentary Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008
Official Selection, Planet in Focus Film Festival, 2008
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THE FILMMAKERS
LAURA DUNN, Director
Laura Dunn started making documentaries in response to her undergraduate experience at Yale University. Through a chronicle of labor strikes on campus, THE SUBTEXT OF A YALE EDUCATION (1999) examines the corporatization of higher education. She then returned to her birthplace to make GREEN (2000), a sobering look at environmental racism along the Mississippi River petrochemical corridor, a.k.a. “Cancer Alley”. Other work includes experimental films BABY (1999), a personal take on population issues, and BECOME THE SKY (2002), an ecological map of power in Texas. Honors include a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Student Academy Award, Yale’s Trumbull College Fine Arts Prize, and the Truer Than Fiction Independent Spirit Award. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and their spirited toddler. THE UNFORESEEN is her first feature film.
TERRENCE MALICK, Executive Producer
Long-time Austinite Terrence Malick approached Laura Dunn four years ago with a documentary film concept. “Take Barton Springs as that which God gave us, and look at what we’re doing to it.” Through the story of these water wars in Austin, Malick encouraged Dunn to “see the whole world through a grain of sand.” An Oscar Nominated director, Malick is the critically acclaimed director of THE THIN RED LINE, BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN. He has shepherded THE UNFORESEEN from beginning to end and served as a source of enduring inspiration to everyone involved.
ROBERT REDFORD, Executive Producer
Growing up in the deteriorating sprawl of Los Angles, Robert Redford sought refuge in the lush landscapes of central Texas where he spent summers with his beloved grandfather. He learned to swim in Barton Springs and credits the rolling hills and area waters with first instilling in him a love for the natural world. In this film, he both reflects on the treasured memories of his childhood and articulates how this battle over a spring is a microcosm for communities everywhere struggling to protect their most precious natural resources from the unrelenting forces of short-term economic growth.
LEE DANIEL, Cinematographer
Lee Daniel has shot a number of ground-breaking feature films and documentaries. His narrative work includes Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Suburbia, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Fast Food Nation. He has lensed many documentaries for television and theatrical release, including I Remember Me, The Hunt for Pancho Villa, Print the Legend: The History of the Western, Be Here to Love Me andYou’re Gonna Miss Me: The Roky Erickson Story.
REVIEWS
Observing locally and thinking globally, Laura Dunn’s astonishing debut doc feature “The Unforeseen” is the kind of transformative viewing experience that has made the current period a golden age for nonfiction film. Pic takes the history and battles over development and sprawl in Austin, Texas, and launches into a visual, scientific and philosophic rumination of humanity’s place on the planet and the limits to growth…
As a cinematic contemplation of human activity on the planet, it far surpasses “An Inconvenient Truth” and its more lecture-like message on global warming.
Robert Koehler
“Commissioned by Malick, director Laura Dunn details a truly engrossing account of the opposition of local residents to a series of proposed suburban subdivision developments in Austin, Texas in the late Eighties and early Nineties. What’s at stake in this instance is the impact these developments will have on water quality in general and on a beloved local spring in particular. But the film ultimately succeeds in having a paradigmatic reach, not least because of the pivotal role newly elected Texas governor George Bush plays in the final chapter of this story. Deploying motion graphics and aerial photography to increasingly mesmerizing effect, and adopting what can only be described as a lyrical approach, Dunn interweaves this gripping narrative of political resistance with the personal story of one of the development’s prime movers, a now-bankrupt real-estate whiz kid whose surprisingly self-reflective interview allows the film to transcend its specifics and finally attain an almost metaphysical realm.
Best film of the festival, hands down. “
Gavin Smith, Film Comment
“The 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival unearths hope and horror from the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague, Israeli prisons, Eastern Congo, the slums of Guatemala, the racist South, Pinochet’s Chile, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Darfur, Belarus, Afghanistan, and (surprise, surprise) Iraq. But it is in Austin, Texas, that this fiercely committed festival locates its imaginative epicenter. Water flows from a 100-million-year-old limestone aquifer into the city of Austin, where it collects in the Barton Springs Pool, a recreational reservoir enjoyed by a population of unusually progressive Texans. Their efforts to save the springs from suburban development provide an initial strata of information in The Unforeseen, an ingeniously scaled, unusually resonant documentary by Laura Dunn…
Talking heads and archival footage are the factual foundation above which rises a soaring, intricate lyricism. This is a matter of dreamy, drifting, rather indulgent, high-definition nature imagery, which bears kinship to the work of executive producer Terrence Malick, as well as a carefully engineered poetics of data.”
Nathan Lee, Village Voice covering the Human Rights Watch Film Festival
“The best, and the least ballyhooed, of the recent wave of “green” documentaries, Dunn’s debut feature contains neither computer-simulations of the earth’s imminent destruction nor the appearance of a celebrity host/narrator to share his own fervent environmentalism. But fret not: Robert Redford (who also executive produced) pops up, as if he were just another talking head, to reminisce about the clear, cool Austin creek he learned to swim in as a boy—the continued existence of which has been endangered by two decades of rapid urban expansion.
Redford’s involvement may be partly responsible for the relatively low profile The Unforeseen had at Sundance this year, where it was presented in the non-competitive American Spectrum sidebar and attended to by relatively little buzz. But any concerns about potential conflicts of interest are rendered irrelevant by Dunn’s clear-eyed intelligence. Rather than taking the whole world as her subject, she has narrowed her focus to one city on one small corner of the planet and shown how, despite the best efforts of environmentalists, urban sprawl has grown there like a cancer.”
Scott Foundas, Village Voice, covering Sundance BAM
It’s a beautiful, soulful work about real estate development and sprawl, focused on Austin’s beloved Barton Springs, and if you think that’s impossible you haven’t seen it.
Dunn never pretends to be a neutral party (no one has yet made a documentary that’s pro-sprawl, as far as I know) but she presents developer Gary Bradley, a perennial villain to the Austin left, as a human being with admirable drive and complicated motivations. Most of Dunn’s interviewees and sources — including Willie Nelson, poet Wendell Berry, the late Ann Richards and Redford himself — come down on the other side, of course, and the governing mood is of both anger and lamentation. “The Unforeseen” is less an issue-driven documentary than a pure visual and sensual experience that seeks to capture the mystery of the American landscape, both paved and wild. Its themes aren’t easy to summarize and its questions defy easy answers.
Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
In her four-years-in-the-making documentary “The Unforeseen,” filmmaker Laura Dunn combines interviews with archival footage and animated graphics in order to chronicle the struggle between preserving our environment and protecting the rights of individuals to pursue their dreams. Although Dunn focuses on the particular situation as it has unfolded in Austin, the film is universal, working as a microcosmic model of similar struggles taking place all over the country… Dunn does an incredible job of condensing this extremely complex battle into a story that is simple and understandable, as well as extremely compelling.
Sally Foster, Film Threat
“[a] mesmeric masterpiece. Its specific subject couldn’t be more prosaic: environmental regulations impacting real estate development in Austin, Texas; particularly one project that threatened the beloved Barton Springs community swimming hole. Within this narrow spectrum, Dunn’s supple and graceful narrative ropes in a tremendous amount, painting a portrait of a nation greedily gobbling up its open space at a virus-like speed, leaving behind a wrecked landscape of unforeseen consequences… Visually it’s close to incomparable, as Dunn’s camera (floating underwater, hovering over horizon-reaching subdivisions, trawling past endless construction acreage) has behind it an instinctual understanding of the terrifying beauty of nature — those who see hints of Terrence Malick in these images will not be shocked to see him listed as producer. But there’s also a powerful political statement here about halting the reckless spread of concrete across the land, for the sake of our species if nothing else.
**** 1/2 Stars
Chris Barsanti, Filmcritic.com
(Full Review)
What is utterly Unforeseen in this documentary is how powerfully poetic this debut from Laura Dunn, whose big-name backers include executive producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, is—literally. The aerial shot of the rapidly rising steel skeleton of the Frost Bank Tower in Austin that opens The Unforeseen—the ominous manner in which it looms over the Texas Capitol an all-too-telling illustration of the relative roles of commerce and democracy in modern-day land development—is accompanied by Wendell Berry’s rich reading of his “Santa Clara Valley,” the poem that inspired the film’s title.
Boxoffice.com
My favorite documentary at AFI FEST turned out to be one I had initially passed on. The Unforeseen was described in the catalogue as “the story of how big developers spoiled a city treasure, and about the consequences continued development has on us all,” which didn’t exactly sound like cinematic gold. But after talking with critic Robert Koehler, who assured me that I couldn’t miss it, I did some last-minute rearranging and was very glad I did.
On executive producer Terrence Malick’s initiative, filmmaker Laura Dunn has crafted a rare entry in environmentally or socially conscious documentaries of late–a movie bristling with information but also with significant formal beauty. Its juxtaposition of facts, figures, and interviews with aerial and underwater imagery, along with Wendell Berry’s poem “Santa Clara Valley” (narrated by the author himself), provides a multilayered examination of what it means for society to “develop” and “grow” while depleting its natural resources.
Doug Cummings, Film Journey
(Full Review)
“Speaking of weird hybrids, American director Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen (*****) answers the question “what if Robert Redford and Terence Malick had an HD baby?” Both men have producer credits on this focused yet expansive documentary, which examines the furor over proposed property developments in an extra-liberal section of Austin, Texas, in the early 1990s. A grassroots campaign to protect a community-sustaining hot spring from predatory builders proved successful until a certain rough, smirking beast slouched into the governor’s office and turned the tide.
There’s more to it than anti-Bush sabre rattling, however. The Unforeseen is the rare doc that tempers its emotional appeals with formal and intellectual rigour. The blend of conventional tactics (talking heads, including Redford’s grizzled mug) with brilliantly designed graphics and Malickian lyrical interludes keeps the film fresh for its duration, and a slow-cooked metaphor linking urban sprawl to cancer (both are comprised of cells replicating beyond a body’s ability to properly integrate them) hits with furious force. The film is a masterpiece of sorts, proving that agit-prop can work outside of the hectoring, Michael Moore-minted format.”
Adam Nayman, Eye Weekly
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