Going up the theater stairs to see "Blue Vinyl," we were handed long necklaces of Mardi Gras beads with a piece of blue vinyl siding attached by a key chain circle. "What the…?" The beads were distributed by the co-directors/producers, Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold, who later introduced the film. The film was coming from winning Best Cinematography at Sundance and has been well-positioned for airing on HBO at 10 PM, Sunday, May 5th.

"Blue Vinyl" addresses the complex issue of toxins in vinyl production by first generously inviting us into the recently re-sided home of Judith's parents, re-sided with - you guessed it - blue vinyl. The film is a deft and delightful balance of Judith's efforts to convince her parents to have the vinyl siding, which is "embossed to look like wood," removed, and her detective work to discover the conspiracy by the vinyl industry to conceal its knowledge of highly harmful toxic byproducts affecting workers in the factory and the surrounding environment. At one point, the combination of Judith's voice-overs and Marty Ehrlich's original music, actually feels like a piece of environmental noir.

The documentary combines animation by Emily Hubley (also animator for "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") to illustrate the life cycles of both the vinyl product - from production to incineration - and one of its highly toxic byproducts, dioxin. She uses line drawings with blue specks making their way up the food chain to indicate the vinyl chloride and dioxin as it travels from factory to stream, to fish, to adult human, to infant.

We follow Judith on an odyssey in a film that employs animation, eerie, slow motion stock footage of black and white hairspray commercials, news footage, and comedy to put across some very serious subject matter. The comic elements come perfectly paced, some of the funniest from the corporate double-speak of industry marketing associates. "Punchlines" are articulated with both quick cuts and lingering shots. While interviewing a vinyl industry Ph.D. William F. Carroll - "filming them filming us filming them" - it becomes clear through pregnant pauses that he feels he has done his job, answered the questions, and doesn't want to continue for fear of saying too much. Another excellent example of the comedy in this piece is the motif of telegraphed, sledgehammer segues from one location to another. In every one we see the ever-present swatch of blue vinyl siding in the arms of our heroine.

Judith and Daniel's odyssey takes them from Long Island to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Venice, Italy, to California and back home again. In Lake Charles, we get a daunting aerial shot of the sprawling vinyl manufacturing facilities, burners ablaze. In Venice, Italy, the co-directors take us down an imposing corridor of shelves stacked to a high ceiling with boxes containing the tumors of rats exposed to vinyl chloride.

With its mix of humor and gravity, accessibility and education, conciseness and common sense, this film has what it takes to move an audience - just as Judith's determination moved her parents - to positive change and to viewing the world, particularly the world of vinyl, in a new way. With the hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year on brain-numbing, high budget pictures without an ounce of purpose or honest humanity to them, looking back on this film will give me hope that there are people doing important, real, and truthful things with the medium of film.

"Blue Vinyl" won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema.