Environmental Film Festival Puts People First

“Everyone here recognizes that environmental issues are often the 100 millionth concern on most people’s minds. They’re the big elephant in the room that people are aware of, and are completely overwhelmed by,” said Don Mosteller, executive director of this year’s Environmental Film Festival at Yale. He straightened his back, his voice soft but steady, like a drummer preparing for a solo. Kroon Hall, home to Yale’s Forestry & Environmental Studies graduate school, where Mosteller is a student, had long since emptied.

“It leads to a lot of ambivalence about what to do, a lot of anxiety, which I think only fuels the denial of climate change,” Mosteller continued. ​“It’s just really … heavy.”

But that’s where film comes in, and the seventh annual EFFY, which runs Friday through Apr. 11. Film, after all, is a popular medium that exists at the intersection of education and entertainment. It’s an artful means to engage, incite, inspire, and compel.

“We want to bring environmental stories to people, and we think films are one of the best vehicles for doing that. It’s an hour, two hours with a lot of different senses being provoked, a greater chance for an emotional response,” Mosteller said. ​“The power of film can be transformational, if it’s really well done.”

As executive director of this year’s EFFY — the scruffy acronym that has also lent itself to the festival’s bizarre mascot, a furry green monster with a sharp smile and sunglasses, holding an amputated film reel — Mosteller and his team of fellow graduate students have been figuring out what constitutes a ​“transformational” film as they select of a diverse array of films. The festival will include 10 feature films and 14 shorts, as well as post-screening discussions with filmmakers and scholars; two symposiums hosted by distinguished environmental film directors and producers; and a youth programming event for middle-school and high-school students. All of the festival’s events are free and open to the public.

The film The Chinese Mayor, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and has been heralded as one of the year’s first great political documentaries, tells the story of the controversial Communist Party Mayor Geng Yanbo as he tries to resuscitate the city of Datong after decades of resource depletion and urban suffocation — but at the expense of displacing tens of thousands of the city’s residents. Deep Time investigates the social and cultural tumult at the center of North Dakota’s recent energy boom, and how the state’s newfound fossil wealth is affecting the state’s indigenous population. Wrenched channels the radical spirit of Edward Abbey as it documents a new generation of committed environmental activists. And Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story, which closes the festival, narrates one couple’s decision to quit grocery shopping for a year and live entirely off of discarded food, a valiant attempt to expose our mystifying and devastating impulse to throw away food before it’s really gone bad.

Although not explicitly a documentary film festival, this year’s lineup features a high quotient of nonfiction films. Besides the occasional movie from Kelly Reichardt or Gus Van Sant, ​“not enough fiction filmmakers are treating environmental issues with the amount of rigor and intention as documentary filmmakers are,” explained Annie Berke, a film and media studies PhD candidate at Yale, as well as the director of programming for this year’s festival.

But documentaries do not have to be static, explanatory, informational affairs, in the vein of the heroic but sententious An Inconvenient Truth. The festival’s directors have attempted to curate films that are dynamic, engaging, responsibly researched, and a joy to behold. They can inspire meditation on the wonders of nature as well a deep connection with people throughout the world who are grappling with environmental issues.

DamNation, which won the Best Feature Film award at last year’s EFFY, came up again and again as a model for the type of people-centric environmental films the festival holds dear. Nominally about the history of dams in the United States and the recent push to remove extraneous ones, DamNation presents its story through a fascinating array of characters, including an athletic environmental activist who rappels down the sides of dams in the middle of the night and paints huge, cartoonish cracks on them, and an elderly woman who spent one summer in her youth traveling through some of California’s grandest national parks, often running naked through the desert to commune with the spectacular and unvarnished natural environment.

To Mosteller, DamNation offers ​“strong narratives behind strong characters. Something that humanizes these issues.” For these characters are more than just talking heads in the context of the documentary’s larger argument. They are passionate, informed participants, whose lives offer the audience a very human, relatable gateway into an environmental issue.

“So many of these are inspiring films, they’re beautiful films,” Mosteller said. ​“At the worst, they’re just going to get you to think.”

When the stakes are this high, with environmental concerns so complex, urgent, and universally important, now seems like the best time to come out and start thinking.

The Environmental Film Festival at Yale runs Apr. 3 through Apr. 11. Any middle school or high school teachers interested in learning more about relevant educational opportunities at the festival should contact [email protected].