Curator Watchlist
A forceful, accessible environmental exposé that helped turn fracking into a mainstream public issue. Its handheld, personal style can feel rough, but the film’s outrage, memorable images, and real-world urgency make it a significant watch for viewers interested in activism and energy politics.
Where to watch: Buy
Sun · 1h 47m
Director: Josh Fox
Starring: Josh Fox, Aubrey K. McClendon, Maurice Hinchey
It is happening all across America-rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground-a hydraulic drilling process called "fracking"-and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.
Josh Fox
Josh Fox, Aubrey K. McClendon, Maurice Hinchey
A forceful, accessible environmental exposé that helped turn fracking into a mainstream public issue. Its handheld, personal style can feel rough, but the film’s outrage, memorable images, and real-world urgency make it a significant watch for viewers interested in activism and energy politics.
Gasland is less interested in being detached than in being alarming, and that directness is part of its power. Josh Fox travels through communities affected by fracking and builds a case from lived experience, unsettling imagery, and the testimony of people who feel ignored by industry and government alike.
The film’s rough edges are obvious: the handheld shooting, loose structure, and intimate narration can feel improvised. But those qualities also give it a raw, immediate quality that suits the subject. It plays like a dispatch from the front lines of an environmental fight that was only beginning to enter the public consciousness.
What lingers most is not just the information, but the sense of contamination spreading outward from one backyard to the next. Even if you come in skeptical of its politics, it remains an important documentary about how industrial power reshapes ordinary life.
megan (2★) · 30 likes
dick cheney made money off the oil and gas industry
percivalpale (3.5★) · 26 likes
The only "mumblecore" documentary I've run into so far. Josh Fox does a great job of portraying the problems with natural gas "fracking" and how it's effecting the people who live near fracking sites, but his shakycam filming style and monotone narration leave more to be desired.
Lisa (3.5★) · 21 likes
It was this documentary, Gasland that brought to the fore the subject of fracking. Over the following years, it continued to appear regularly all over the news, even here in little old New Zealand! (Fracking is a technique used to extract natural gas or petroleum from rocks, fracturing them by injecting specialised fluid into cracks to force them to open. For over 20 years, it has been used here in NZ, but that may not such a wise idea in a
lily! (2.5★) · 19 likes
can't believe i got depressed from watching a documentary I only saw half of, filmed on a nokia brick, by a guy who plays the banjo and speaks like r.pat giving his diary entries monolouge in the new batman
The Ron (4★) · 19 likes
GasLand is a fantastic documentary that offers damning proof that the process of hydraulic fracturing "fracking" is polluting the water supply, the air, and making animals and people very sick. Of course the companies responsible deny it, all in their quest for the almighty dollar. It's amazing how little these money hungry companies care about people when it can fill their wallets. You hear the phrase "money is the root of all evil" most of your life and if you
A populist, human-scale fight against industrial contamination with similar outrage and community stakes.
Another legal and environmental battle centered on poisoned water and the costs of corporate negligence.
A landmark issue documentary that turns a complex environmental crisis into a persuasive public warning.
Shares the activist-documentary energy, investigative structure, and urgent moral framing.
A widely seen advocacy documentary that exposes institutional denial and the human cost of exploitation.
A clear-eyed critique of industrial systems and the hidden consequences of profit-driven production.
A broader but thematically aligned look at corporate behavior, power, and social harm.
A fictional companion piece about extraction, greed, and the corrosive logic of resource capitalism.
Complex, politically charged storytelling about energy, corruption, and the machinery behind oil and gas.
A corporate-thriller perspective on environmental liability, legal pressure, and moral compromise.
A drama built directly around fracking debates, rural landowners, and the ethics of energy development.
A modern environmental legal drama about contamination, denial, and the long fight for accountability.
environmental pollution, corporate power, resource extraction, public health, rural communities, activism, political documentary, water contamination
environmental activism, corporate greed, fracking, pollution, public health, rural America, political documentary, investigative nonfiction, resource extraction, social justice