Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) will collaborate with an International Film Festival in India

FLEFF, along with a consortium of national and international organizations, will partner with the Bangalore festival. The distributors are Documentary Educational Resources, Bullfrog Films and Microcinema International.

For the third year in a row, Ithaca College faculty members Patricia Zimmermann and Tom Shevory, co-directors of the college’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), have curated a selection of works screened at last spring’s FLEFF for inclusion in “Voices from the Waters, 2009.” A four-day international film festival to be held this September in Bangalore, India. “Voices from the Waters” will spotlight water scarcity, river pollution, floods and droughts, climate change, deforestation and other global issues surrounding water.

“The 2009 edition of ‘Voices from the Water’ will be an effort by students, filmmakers, artists, water activists, architects and engineers from across the world to consider the impact of water on our contemporary lives and our futures,” Zimmermann said.

“This year’s festival seeks to embrace and trigger interdisciplinary dialog and vigorous debate on water in all its forms,” added Shevory. “It’s a unique platform for voices of concern over water that includes testimonies of people working on and with water.”

A listing of the works curated by Zimmermann and Shevory, along with summaries, is attached.

Launched in 1997 as an outreach project sponsored by Ithaca College, Cornell University’s Center for the Environment and Einaudi Center for International Studies and others, FLEFF is now under the auspices of the Ithaca College Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies. FLEFF has become a major regional event in upstate New York and enjoys an international reputation as a cutting-edge, multi-arts program.

                                                                              -----

Ithaca College’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)
Curated titles for the 4th annual “Voices from the Waters” Film Festival

Bangalore, India
September 2009

Curated by Patricia Zimmermann and Thomas Shevory, co-directors
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca, New York

with :

- “Ice Bears of the Beaufort” (Arthur Smith, United States, 2008; 55 min) : This documentary shows Alaska’s Beaufort Sea coast as critical polar bear habitat. Five years in the making by a single resident of an Inupiat Eskimo village, “Ice Bears of the Beaufort” is a color-intense, cinematic portrait of a polar bear society on the edge of survival.

- “The Other Campaign: Indigenous Voices of the North, Part Two” include “Cucapas and Kiliwas 9,000 Years Later” (58 min) and “From San Jose de la Zorra, Northwestern Mexico”
Living in northwestern Mexico, the Cucapas and Kiliwas base their survival on the fish found in the delta of the Colorado River. The government, however, prohibits these people from fishing there. For the Kiliwas, who live in the mountains, the situation is more grave: many had to abandon their land, leaving behind a ghost town and a population on the edge of extinction. In another piece in this collection, the Kumial people, indigenous to Baja California, have been displaced from their ancestral lands by large landowners in collaboration with the Mexican state. The survival of the Kumial as a “first nation” is at risk.

- “Umiaq Skin Boat” (DER) (Jobie Weetaluktuk, Canada, 2008, 31 min)
“Umiaq Skin Boat” is a beautiful and poetic film about a group of Inuit elders in Inukjuak, Quebec, who decide one summer to build the first traditional seal skin boat their community has seen in over 50 years. Over the course of working together on the boat, the elders recount astonishing stories of survival while navigating volatile and unforgiving Arctic waters.

- “Weather the Storm: The Fight to Stay Local in the Global Fishery” (Directed by Charles Menzies and Jennifer Rashleigh, Canada, 2008, 36 min.)
In today’s global economy, the world’s ocean resources as well as local fishing communities are being hit hard by enormous industrial “floating factories” that follow the fish wherever they are abundant and move on once the fish stocks have been plundered. The fishing communities on France’s rugged western coast are fighting back by launching a multi-faceted strategy to stay small and successful in the face of global competition. Although the battle to save the oceans is often waged between environmentalists and corporations, this film gives voice to an important group who just may have the small-scale solutions needed to preserve the ocean’s resources.