Return to Elektra Springs Premieres on FUTURESTATES

Writer and director Christopher Munch gives us this inside look at the inspiration behind this week’s FUTURESTATES short, Return to Elektra Springs, which is available to stream for free at futurestates.tv and on pbs.org.

My interest in the subject of new energy – advanced energy technologies that have historically had a hard time gaining traction because they run counter to scientific orthodoxy or have been suppressed by industrial or governmental elements – has grown over the past couple of years, even as the world has grown more in need of them. A century after Ida Tarbell published her landmark exposé of the Standard Oil Trust that led to its breakup, the list of inventors whose groundbreaking work had been ruthlessly kept from the public by way of intimidation, economic subversion, and even lethal force only continues to grow. Recently, however, the progress made by such inventors as Andrea Rossi, whose LENR (cold fusion)-based “E-Cat” is beginning to be commercially marketed. There are a score of similar “over-unity” devices (devices generating more energy than is required to run them) in various stages of development, any of which, when allowed to come to fruition, could be nothing short of revolutionary in their ability to displace carbon-based fuels.

Return to Elektra Springs recounts a small portion of one such inventor’s journey. Will Friedrich is forced, by way of a natural disaster, to reckon with his earlier decision to remain silent in the face of dire threats. Anton, an amateur unconstrained by academic affiliations, shows him that it is indeed possible to build an over-unity device and “get away with it.” Will’s choice of whether to live in fear or follow the path of his heart and make the contribution to society that he was meant to make is one that I am optimistic the visionaries of today and tomorrow will have an easier time making.