The SA Eco Film Festival aims to showcase intriguing and creative film content from SA and across the World to highlight the issues that effect us all.
With engaging and thought provoking program content, Q&A’s, audience interaction, guest speakers and more, this year the SA Eco Film Festival is gearing up to create an ever bigger impact than ever before.
The Festival, running 31 March to 3 April at The Labia Theatre, aims to showcase intriguing and creative film content from SA and across the World to highlight the issues that effect us all, whilst introducing participants, filmmakers and audience members alike to sustainable living choices and life style changes that are available, today.
With themes from New Economics to ECO-Friendly Transport, Social Justice to Conservation and Recycling, Upcycling and Waste Cooking the Festival line up covers every aspect of informed Eco and environmental debate.
Confirmed International films enjoying their South African Premieres include multi-award winners, LANDFILL HARMONIC (Best Family Friendly Feature Award 2015 Maui Film Festival, Environmental Award 2015 Sheffield Doc Festival), HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD (Hot Docs, Sheffield and SUNDANCE winner!) and THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING the Naomi Klein film based on her latest best-seller. REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR – making a welcome, overdue, debut on the big screen- and the hotly tipped BIKES Vs CARS (already garnering Festival accolades all over Europe) will surely stimulate debate over the future of transport.
The 3rd Annual SA Eco Film Festival is proudly supported by leading Western Cape ECO Friendly business partners Sustainable.co.za, Ballo, Reliance and Group 1 Nissan showcasing the 100% electric Nissan Leaf.
ECO FILM FEST 2016 MAIN PROGRAMME – SHORT SYNOPSES
BAOBABS – BETWEEN LAND AND SEA (55 mins, Madagascar/France 2015)
The baobab’s sheer size and original shapes make it one of the most remarkable trees on the planet. In Madagascar, a great source of inspiration for filmmakers and photographers with it’s unique biodiversity and exceptional landscapes, these giants of nature are currently threatened by deforestation. French ecologist and film maker Cyrille Cornu, a renowned expert on these beautiful giants, documents travel, by pirogue, exploring 400 km of wild and isolated coastline in the south-west of Madagascar accessing the world of the Vezo, a nomadic tribe of the sea, and the heart of isolated forests that are home to the baobabs.
BIKES Vs CARS (91 Mins, Sweden 2015)
Bikes vs Cars depicts a global crisis that we all deep down know we need to talk about: climate, earth’s resources, cities where the entire surface is consumed by the car. An ever-growing, dirty, noisy traffic chaos. The bike is a great tool for change, but the powerful interests who gain from the private car invest billions each year on lobbying and advertising to protect their business. In the film we meet activists and thinkers from 9 Cities and 3 continents fighting for better cities who refuse to stop riding despite the increasing numbers killed in traffic.
GAMBLING ON EXTINCTION (Germany/Canada 2015)
A powerful documentary that takes you from the killing fields in Kenya and South Africa to the trading hubs of Vietnam and China with undercover investigators, rangers, ex-poachers, conservationists and buyers. Director Jakob Kneser exposes the lethal mechanisms of the global trade, the terrorist connection, explains who the customers are, what generates demand, and what can be done to stop the slaughter.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD (109 Mins UK/Canada 2015)
A thrilling, sometimes terrifying film chronicling the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers – Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists, and American draft dodgers – who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement. When youthful energy comes up against the complexities of a growing organization, and idealism meets compromise, the group find their battle to save the planet forces them also to fight each other. This insightful film is also a vibrant, moving reflection on the struggle to balance the political and the personal.
LANDFILL HARMONIC (85 mins 2015 Paraguay/USA)
The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, a Paraguayan musical group play instruments made entirely out of garbage. When their story goes viral, the orchestra is catapulted into the global spotlight. Under the guidance of idealistic music director Favio Chavez, the orchestra must navigate a strange new world of arenas and sold-out concerts. However, when a natural disaster strikes their country, Favio must find a way to keep the orchestra intact and provide a source of hope for their town. The film is a testament to the transformative power of music and the resilience of the human spirit. (Spanish – English Sub-Titles)
RACING EXTINCTION ( 94 mins 2015 USA)
Oscar®-winning director Louie Psihoyos (THE COVE) assembles a team of artists and activists on an undercover operation to expose the hidden world of endangered species and the race to protect them against mass extinction. Spanning the globe to infiltrate the world’s most dangerous black markets and using high tech tactics to document the link between carbon emissions and species extinction, RACING EXTINCTION reveals stunning, never-before seen images that truly change the way we see the world.
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING (89 mins 2015 USA/Canada)
Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.
Inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.
WASTECOOKING (82 mins 2015 Austria)
David Gross has a car that runs on used vegetable oil, a mobile stove and a host of culinary ideas in his backpack. An entertaining road movie detailing a journey through five European countries, where the only thing on the menu is what others call garbage. David whips up creative meals aimed at fighting food waste and our consumption driven society, and at the same time inspire us to search for creative solutions. (German, English, French, Dutch language + English sub-titles)
REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR (90 mins 2012 USA)
When electric cars first appeared on the market in the 1990s, mass production and commercialization was abruptly—and dubiously—shut down, a story told in Chris Paine’s first documentary Who Killed The Electric Car? Just a few short years later, the race is back on to develop an affordable, stylish electric car and win over a skeptical public. Revenge Of The Electric Car goes behind the closed doors of Nissan, GM, Elon Musk’s innovative Tesla Motors and an independent car converter named Greg “Gadget” Abbott to find the story of the global resurgence of electric cars. Without using a single drop of oil, this new generation of automobile emerges as the future: fast, furious and cleaner than ever.
THE ANTHROPOLOGIST (80 mins 2015 USA)
The parallel stories of two women: Margaret Mead, who popularized cultural anthropology around the world; and Susie Crate, an environmental anthropologist currently studying the impact of climate change. Uniquely revealed from their daughters’ perspectives, Mead and Crate demonstrate a fascination with how societies are forced to negotiate the disruption of their traditional ways of life, whether through encounters with the outside world or the unprecedented change wrought by melting permafrost, receding glaciers, and rising tides.
HOPE FOR ALL – Food Matters. You Matter. (101 mins 2015 Germany)
Hope For All is a moving and eye-opening documentary uncovering the effects of Western dietry habits to our health, the environment and our treatment of livestock. Evidence-based scientific arguments and solutions send a clear message of hope, if we change the way we eat, we change ourselves and the planet – for good!
TRUE COST (92 mins 2015 USA)
This is a story about clothing. It’s about the clothes we wear, the people who make them, and the impact the industry is having on our world. The price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically. The True Cost is a groundbreaking documentary film that pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing?
Filmed in countries all over the world, from the brightest runways to the darkest slums, and featuring interviews with the world’s leading influencers including Stella McCartney, Livia Firth and Vandana Shiva, The True Cost is an unprecedented project that invites us on an eye opening journey around the world and into the lives of the many people and places behind our clothes.
INFO: Erica projects@ericaglynschofield.com 083 567 8989 or Dougie bfd@butterflyeffect.co.za 082 560 2296 Visit SA Eco Film Festival
The South African Eco Film Festival is a project of While You Were Sleeping, a registered South African Non Profit Organisation (NPO registration no: 137-167 NPO) committed to bringing documentaries with important social themes to South African audiences; this year in association with Erica Schofield.
