Palace Films is pleased to announce that award-winning writer/director JOSH FOX will be visiting Australia to support the national release of his controversial documentary GASLAND.

The tour will include metropolitan and regional locations beginning in Brisbane on Monday November 8, 2010 and Mr. Fox will participate in Q&A screenings at selected locations ahead of the film’s national release on November 18. Details of public appearances will be announced soon.

After premiering at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize for Documentary and was voted the best competition film of any section by indieWIRE’s Sundance Critics Poll, GASLAND has gone on to screen at major film festivals around the world including Toronto Hot Docs, Sydney and Los Angeles Film Festivals.

Part vérité travelogue, part ecological expose, part showdown, GASLAND is a first-person story of discovery and empowerment that began in September 2006 when theatre director Fox received a letter from a natural gas company, offering him $100 000 for permission to explore his upstate New York property. His curiosity led him to discover that in the race for ‘cleaner’, greener & more efficient energy sources, the largest natural gas drilling boom in history has resulted in an environmental disaster of shocking proportions, and the PR-spun US government has not only turned a blind eye, it has regulated itself out of the picture.

The controversial Halliburton-led process of gas extraction that features in the film – hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) – has recently made national news in Australia as the burgeoning practice continues to spread in regions across the Eastern and Western seaboard, with recorded incidents of water contamination.