AwareGuide - Your Guide to Life Changing Media

Festival-goers can expect to see Award-winning films about nature, community activism, adventure, conservation, water, energy and climate change, wildlife, environmental justice, agriculture, and Native American and indigenous cultures.

This year’s selections will not only take audiences to some of the most remote and beautiful places on the planet, but introduce them to the magnificent animals that inhabit these places and the courageous individuals who are working to protect and preserve both for future generations.  This year’s films instill a deep appreciation and a sense of wonder for the natural world that surrounds and supports us.

Some of the standout films confirmed thus far include 180° South directed by Chris Malloy (the eldest brother of the professional surfing and filmmaking Malloy Brothers), which follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.  Queen of the Sun is a beautiful film with remarkable nature cinematography about the global honeybee crisis.  The documentary Waste Land follows renowned artist Vik Muniz to the world’s largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janerio.  Directed by Lucy Walker the film offers an incredible story about the transformative power of art and the power of the human spirit.  In Felt Soul’s Eastern Rises fishing is poetry; Bigfoot lurks in the fog; and fishermen risk life and limb in decommissioned Cold War helicopters to explore rivers in the Russian Far East that have never been fished before.

In addition to these empowering and for some, life-changing films, the Wild and Scenic® Film Festival hosts many of the top filmmakers in environmental and adventure filmmaking today. Such luminaries include Sir Patrick Stewart, Peter Coyote, Daryl Hannah, Winona LaDuke, Ron Kauk, Colin Beavan, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Jeremy Jones.  Last year, over fifty filmmakers and activists traveled from around the globe to speak to festival-goers following their respective films and in workshops held in the festival’s two activists centers.

This year’s special guests include Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gary Snyder.  Frequently described as the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology”, Snyder is a founding intellect, essayist and leader of the new environmental awareness that supports legislation and preservation without losing sight of direct wild experience – local people, animals, plants, watersheds and food sources.  Practice of the Wild, a film about Snyder that features vintage footage and a current and in depth conversation between he and fellow poet and novelist Jim Harrison, will be one of this year’s festival features.  Following the film, Snyder along with Randy Hayes, founder of the Rainforest Action Network, will lead a conversation on environmental activism and take questions from the audience.

Also attending this year is filmmakers, professional kayakers, and National Geographic Young Explorer grantees Andy Maser and Trip Jennings who will be screening their film Spoil, and Maser will also share The Greatest Migration.  Returning to the film festival is award-winning journalist, author, filmmaker and National Geographic adventurer Jon Bowermaster and Global Exchange and the Green Festival’s co-founder Kevin Danaher.