FLICKERS: Rhode Island International Film Festival 2011

With wonderful heart and an impressive sense of scale, Tiffany Shlain's vibrant and insightful documentary, "Connected," explores the visible and invisible connections linking major issues of our time--the environment, consumption, population growth, technology, human rights, the global economy--while searching for her place in the world during a transformative time in her life. Employing a splendidly imaginative combination of animation and archival footage, plus several surprises, Shlain constructs a chronological tour of Western modernization through the work of her late father, Leonard Shlain, a surgeon and best-selling author of Art and Physics and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. With humor, curiosity and irony, the Shlain family life merges with philosophy to create both a personal portrait and a proposal for ways we can move forward as a civilization. An exhilarating rollercoaster ride, the film proposes that after centuries of declaring independence, it may be time for us to declare our interdependence instead.