Gasland

Gasland (2010), watch online on iFILM — Josh Fox's documentary that started when a natural gas company mailed him a $100,000 lease offer for his land in Pennsylvania. He turned it down and drove across the country instead to see what had happened to the neighbors who said yes.

What he found: residents in rural Colorado lighting their tap water on fire, Wyoming ranchers with dead livestock, families in Texas reporting years of unexplained illness. The cause, in each case, traced back to hydraulic fracturing — the drilling method that had expanded quietly across rural America. Fox filmed it all with a hand-held camera and a filmmaker's eye for the telling detail.

The film took the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and landed an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. It reset the terms of the national fracking debate and pushed regulators toward the first serious review of the practice. Watch Gasland online on iFILM.