A documentary by Laura Dunn. Unrated. Plays Friday and Saturday, May 2 and 3, Monday, May 5, and Thursday and Friday, May 8 and 9, at the Vancity Theatre

Terrence Malick and Robert Redford helped produce The Unforeseen, a mesmerizing study of untrammeled growth in suburban Austin, Texas. The location is perfect: Austin—a literal oasis of cultural and horticultural life in a red-state desert—has become a steadily expanding convergence point for the educated and the opportunistic, with its green beltways under attack by developers who want to squeeze real estate out of every available park site and riverbank.

This unusually lyrical film, directed by Laura Dunn, is less a work of advocacy than a cool-headed contemplation of the forces that pit otherwise like-minded people against each other—and isn’t that an apt metaphor for America in 2008?

Among the participants here are Redford, commenting ruefully on the loss of Austin’s beautiful swimming holes; former governor Ann Richards, addressing the politics of land use; and, most crucially, Gary Bradley, a Texas tract-home builder who, after the ’90s boom, went several steps too far, even for his own good. (As the mustachioed villain of the piece, he comes across as a two-bit version of the oil man in There Will Be Blood.)

Still, the movie is richer in images than in talking heads. Its title refers to a Wendell Berry poem that looks back, elegiacally, at the emptiness of the postmodern mind, in which “nothing happened or lived that had not been foreseen”. The film’s point, perhaps, is that we have been raised to misunderstand the world as it really exists, even as it threatens to cease existing.