Dispatch: SF Green Film Festival Award Winners
by Ryder W. Miller
It was very inspiring to be able to take part in this celebration of new films that have found a warm spot in their hearts for this wonderful planet we are so lucky to live on. There is really not any other planet that we know about that can sustain life like we are used to here. The Earth is blessed with a number of features that support a variety and diversity of life.
The SF Green Film Festival has shown that we need to take better care of it. We are in fact endangering ourselves and many of the other creatures that live on the planet. Films are a great way to bring immediacy to these stories. The visual can be very effective in keeping people’s attention and can even take the viewer to someplace else. A story can be very insightful and emotional. There is certainly a lot of passion behind the scenes to produce them. Sometimes the film projects take years to fruition.
This year 60 new films, long and short, were shown at the Festival which will be five years old next year. Presented were an abundance of stories which sounded the alarm, investigated issues, told stories and sounded the alarm. Unfortunately the public might not have access to most of these films. Some will make it to other film festivals, some to PBS, and other will be for sale on the Internet.
One might find themselves renewed and invigorated by these films which remind us of problems and succeed in getting us to care. There were stories about endangered species, water pollution and scarcity, air pollution, habitat destruction, monkey wrenching, art, activism…… And so much more. There were a whole amalgam of issues and one should understand that Environmentalism is a whole slate of issues and there is so much to plug into.
These were serious and uncomfortable films that will remind one that these are inconvenient truths that we need to address and hopefully remedy. Looking on the web one can find out more about the films this year, and some of the recent award winners. These Green film makers to use a cliché remind that a world is a terrible thing to waste. The below are somethings to keep your eyes out for:
http://sfgreenfilmfest.org/2014/06/2014-awards/
BEST FEATURE AWARD
2014 Ben Knight, Travis Rummel, Matt Stoecker, DamNation
2013 Marcus Imhoof, More Than Honey
2012 Anthony Baxter, You’ve Been Trumped
BEST SHORT AWARD
2014 Jilli Rose, Sticky
2013 Douglas Gayeton, The Story of An Egg
2012 Simon Robson, Coalition of the Willing
GREEN TENACITY AWARD
2014 Leah Mahan, Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek
2013 Thomas Riedelsheimer
2012 Frank Piasecki Poulsen, Blood in the Mobile
2011 Fredrik Gertten, Bananas!*
INSPIRING LIVES AWARD
2014 David Bond, Project Wild Thing
2013 Beth and George Gage, Bidder 70
2012 Mark MacInnis, Urban Roots
AUDIENCE AWARD
2014 Sandy McLeod, Seeds of Time
2013 Patrick Shen, La Source
2012 Mark Hall, Sushi: the Global Catch
Ryder W. Miller is an environmental reporter, independent scholar, critic, and eco-critic who writes about Nature, Astronomy, the Sea, Academic books, Art, American Literature, and Genre Literature. He also writes short stories (usually genre stories) and poems. He is the editor of From Narnia to a Space Odyssey and co-writer of San Francisco: A Natural History. He is currently looking for a publisher for a book of Nature Writing/News Columns called An Ocean Beach Diary (published in The West Portal Monthly and Redwood Coast Review), and a collection of genre stories (many already published in Mythic Circle and The Lost Souls website). He has published on the web what could be a book collection of essays about science fiction and fantasy. He is also working on a anthology of Environmental stories called Green Visions. Following the dictum of C.S. Lewis he has come to believe that it is easier to criticize than understand, but not every book is worthwhile or a contribution.