Daily Loaf

Talk about timely. Not only green, but free!

Entering its 11th year, Eckerd College’s Environmental Film Festival may not be the most renowned film festival in the area. However, the festival’s achievements and program lineup remain simply stellar, and its themes more than ever appropriate for our times.

The officially titled Environmental Film Festival ‘Visions of Nature/Voices of Nature’ was started many years ago under the direction of Professor Cathy Griggs as the Native American Film Festival, but expanded years later to focus on environmental issues and all humans’ connection to nature.

Past luminaries have included Victor Nunez (Ulee’s Gold), but this year the festival’s connection to the Sundance Film Festival pays great dividends with  the screening of Dirt! The Movie!, along with an appearance from director Gene Rosow.

(Did I mention the festival is free?)

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Every year for the past several, Eckerd College’s “International Cinema” series has been offering up exciting and innovative films from around the world to anyone who wants to show up, most Fridays (7pm) during the regular school year.

Mind Game (plays THIS Friday, Feb. 6, 7pm)

Maybe this is shameless self-promotion, since I run the program, but it is free and open to the public and there are usually some empty seats in the Miller Auditorium that are nearly as comfortable as the couch you’ll need to vacate in order to make it down to south Saint Pete and check out what we have to offer. For the past few weeks, my students and I have been bragging about the great time we were having in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival, so now we’re giving you a chance to see some of the cool things that tend not to play in the local multiplexes. Nearly everything we screen is from a 35mm print (the real thing!), and our theater is very nice – no sticky floors and loud teenagers (unobnoxious teens are of course welcome)!

This week’s film (Fri, Feb. 6, 7pm) is a strange one: a mind-bending and innovative Japanese animation focusing on Nishi, a loser with a crush on his childhood girlfriend, on a psychedelic journey to heaven and back, chased by Yakuza. Mind Game is definitely not for children! Read the rest of this entry »

A girl plays by the rapidly eroding shoreline, in Everything's Cool

Sundance has had a green streak for a long time. It goes deeper than the new line of organic cotton festival wear, and the reliable influx of hybrid vehicles into town for the week. Films like An Inconvenient Truth, Blue Vinyl, Everything’s Cool, The Unforeseen, Who Killed the Electric Car, Fields of Fuel, Flow, Manufactured Landscapse, Up the Yangtze all premiered at Sundance over the last few years and all focus heavily on themes of environmental change and of connections between people and their environments. The festival’s related commitment to Native American stories goes back to its beginnings.

I always pay close attention to such films because of my involvement with Eckerd College’s “Visions of Nature, Voices of Nature,” Environmental Film Festival, that I have co-directed along with its founder Cathy Griggs for the past three years, and that began as a Native American film festival. For several years, we have tried to supplement the February lineup with at least one film that had just shown for the first time at Sundance. Last year it was Up the Yangtze and The Unforeseen (which played Sundance in 2007), and before that we screened Everything’s Cool. It goes beyond documentary. We have also screened fictional feature films from Sundance, films in which place plays a prominent role, such as Chris Eyre’s Edge of America, Jake Mahaffy’s War, and Kevin Wilmott’s CSA: Confederate States of America. (Kevin Wilmott is back again this year, with a western that I discuss below). We’ll see whether we can manage to pull it off again this year.

There are lots to choose from… Read the rest of this entry »