The word “entanglement” usually evokes negative connotations of entrapment, complicated liaisons, and trying associations. However, I have been entangled in a very positive way with FLEFF over the 25 years of its existence.
When I moved to Ithaca in 1998, I embraced the opportunity to contribute to FLEFF as a pioneering effort to bring the best of environmental film to Upstate New York.
To give a sense of FLEFF’s importance as a film festival innovator, Washington, D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, which bills itself as the “premier” environmental film festival in the United States, marks its thirtieth anniversary in 2022. So, FLEFF, celebrating 25 years, started just five years after America’s first.
FLEFF’s location in Ithaca, a college town surrounded by the striking natural beauty of the Finger Lakes, provides the ideal location to bring filmmakers, experimental media artists, cultural critics, environmental activists, scholars, and emerging leaders together to watch, reflect, and debate the concerns brought vividly before them on screen.
While festivals dedicated to ethnographic film, wildlife, human rights, and a range of similar topics predate DCEFF and FLEFF, the focus on the environment and the ways in which we are all entangled through the natural world with politics, economics, culture, and the arts speaks to a moment when film provides a new way of picturing human life on planet earth.
Filmmakers working across fiction and nonfiction modes demonstrate that we need to see the planet and political action more creatively if we are to address environmental crises such as global warming, pandemics, pollution, deforestation, water mismanagement, food shortages and urban sprawl.
