The Unforeseen

Expanding with an organic sweep, Dunn’s debut eco-doc turns the battle to save a beloved Austin, Texas, swimming hole from ambitious urban developers into an engrossing microcosmic metaphor – first global, then spiritual – for a world eating itself alive in its hunger for growth. Lensed with a lyrical beauty that nods squarely to exec producer Terrence Malick, Dunn’s musings arrive via startling visual symmetries, refocusing gracefully between great (God’s-eye photography, motion graphics) and small (talking heads, glittering underwater footage). Even if the director eventually hard-pedals her pantheist imagery into cliché, this inconvenient truth is discreet, intimate and regularly surprising.