Environmental film festival for Cape Town
In response to various campaigns launched to highlight global warming comes Earthnotes, a film festival of environmental documentaries. The documentaries will be screened between 27 July and 8 August 2007 at the Labia on Orange in Cape Town, after which it will move up the west-coast to Namibia.
The festival will feature a range of documentaries from international and local film producers, all carrying messages of caution about the state of the earth.
“The common thread in all these films is a message of caution about the state of the earth, encouraging each of us to think and talk, but they also raise a note of hope for the earth, empowering us to act,” says organiser Raquel Garcia from DLIST.
After the screenings, Q&A sessions will be conducted with a range of environmental experts.
Earthnotes pays special attention to the oceans and water. Documentaries such as A World Without Water shed light on the impending global scarcity of water, and Farming the Seas on over fishing of the world's oceans. A Hell of Fishing is a trenchant documentary that shows the effects of over fishing in the African context.
Global issues
The documentaries also cover controversial and timely global issues.
Crude Impact and Source are two award-winning films that expose the collision of the insatiable appetite for oil with the rights of indigenous cultures and the environment. From Brazil comes an example of how cities can be planned in a more sustainable way in A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil.
Local productions range from images of the dry land and productive seas of the west coast featured in two episodes of A Last Glimpse series, to A Paradise under Pressure on the east coast, and the incredible interactions between species in the African savannah captured in Neil Curry's award-winning film The Elephant, the Emperor and the Butterfly Tree.
In addition to the Labia, the festival will be screened at the newly launched Environmental Resource Centre at the Bellville Campus of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) 30 July – 8 August.
Garcia said the festival – planned to become an annual event – would travel from Cape Town to towns along the West Coast, culminating in showings in Namibia.
DLIST is an online information sharing community of individuals and organisations from coastal areas of South Africa, Namibia and Angola who are eager to discuss, educate and be part of solutions for common environmental problems.
