'Racing Extinction' Sundance Trailer: 'The Cove' Director Sounds The Alarm For Mass Extinction

As the Sundance Film Festival kicks off, even those of us stuck at home miles away from Park City are getting a first look at some of this year's highlights. One of those is Racing Extinction, the new documentary from Louie Psihoyos (The Cove).

Racing Extinction looks at humanity's role in mass extinction, revealing how close we are to losing thousands of species. Watch the Racing Extinction trailer after the jump.

The Oceanic Preservation Society debuted the Racing Extinction trailer on YouTube.

Racing Extinction has been on our radar for a little while already — it was on Germain's list of 30 films to look forward to at the festival. We don't have a review to run just yet, but the Racing Extinction trailer serves up an alarming and intriguing peek.

Psihoyos' The Cove offered an alarming look at dolphin slaughter. People definitely took notice, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2010. Racing Extinction looks even more ambitious, with an even bigger scope. The truths it reveals aren't pretty, but they are important.

Here's the Racing Extinction synopsis from Sundance:

Louie Psihoyos's The Cove (2009 Sundance Film Festival, U.S. Documentary Audience Award) exposed viewers to the brutal practice of dolphin slaughter. The Academy Award-winning director now bears witness to a global problem—mankind's role in precipitating mass extinction, potentially resulting in the loss of half of the world's species.

Believing that images can stimulate empathy and in turn change behavior, Psihoyos joins forces with activists, scientists, nature photographers, and cutting-edge inventors to draw attention to the dangers we face. While covert operations reveal the horrific black-market trade in endangered aquatic species, the film's broader lens uncovers the even more disastrous consequences of human activity, chiefly the release of ocean-killing methane and carbon from energy consumption.

With stakes as high as the survival of life on the planet, Racing Extinction dispenses with apathy or fatalism to emerge as an urgent, affirming call to action to stem the tide before it's too late.