The Great Climate Film Fest Guide
Tickets are going fast! What to watch, how to fest, and what to expect.
Hi all,
The inaugural Climate Film Festival is almost here! With almost forty events during the opening weekend of Climate Week NYC, it may be a little overwhelming. Luckily, we’re here to help!
Dive into this guide for:
🎬 What to Watch
🎉 How to Fest
And finally, be sure to get tickets today! They’re going fast, and we expect to only have waitlist available at the door. Again this is your PSA: if you want to attend the festival, reserve your spot now!
See you at the movies,
Alec
What to Watch
We’re thrilled to showcase 60+ films across genres and formats. Whether you’re looking for a major studio feature, a riveting indie documentary, or a boundary-defying short, you’ll find it at CFF. It can be hard to know what to choose, so let’s start with a simple question:
What’re you in the mood for?
For gripping US and world premieres that set the stakes, catch our Saturday centerpiece ⛈️ The Here Now Project and 🛢️ VALVE TURNERS.
For inspiration and the power of art, be sure to get tickets for 🎨 Arts X Climate and DreamWorks’ 🤖 The Wild Robot.
For stunning films about coming of age in a changing world, don’t miss the chance to see 🐋 One with the Whale and 🌳 Hollow Tree.
For something fun and different, grab tickets for 🌎 Earth II, 👩🚀 Experimental Climate Shorts, and 🔥 Hot Takes: Climate Comedy.
For stories of activism and grassroots impact, watch 🗽 Emergent City, 💧 Dive in, Rise Up: Environmental Justice & Water, and ✊ Power Shift: Defying Fossil Fuels.
For glaciers, coral, seaweed, parasites, and stories of innovation, start the weekend off with 👩🔬 Science & Solutions, 🧊 CANARY, and 🏙️ An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet + Freetown: Cooling a City.
For foodies, get tickets for 👩🏾🌾 Farming While Black & ᏗᏂᏠᎯ ᎤᏪᏯ (Meet Me at the Creek) and 🌾 Common Ground.
For global perspectives across genres, plan on 😱 Trash, Terror, & Tomorrow: Eco-Anxiety at the Brink, 🌏 Young Voices, Global Perspectives, and 🏔️ The Weight of Water: The Human Cost of Climate Crisis & Mountain Man.
Gripping US and World Premieres
⛈️ The Here Now Project (US Premiere, Sat. 9/21 at 6:15pm) is the Centerpiece screening at CFF. Edited together from thousands of hours of social media footage, The Here Now Project is a portrait of the climate disasters of 2021 through the eyes, cameras, and phones of those who experienced it. At once epic and intimate, the film carries an urgent message: we’re all in this, together.
🛢️ VALVE TURNERS (World Premiere, Sat. 9/21 at 8:30pm) follows a group of activists through an act of civil disobedience as they shut down the five major pipelines bringing oil from Canada to the US. VALVE TURNERS is gripping, a real-life How to Blow Up a Pipeline, tracking the action and courtroom drama with cinema verité footage in order to ask: at what point should citizens take action in their own communities?
Find Inspiration
🎨 Arts X Climate (9/21 at 12:45pm) features visionary creators responding to the climate crisis through art. These artists record the soundscapes of nature, paint with pollution, repurpose waste, and illustrate our impact. These beautiful, engaging films show how art can help heal the planet. A stunning program of shorts!
🤖 The Wild Robot (9/22 at 2:00pm) brings climate themes into a beautifully animated, epic story of a robot crash landing on an island and learning from and befriending animals. A special advanced screening of this family film that you won’t want to miss. Supported by Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, and NRDC Rewrite the Future.
Coming of Age in a Changing World
♨️ Searching for Amani (Fri, 9/20 at 6:00pm. SOLD OUT) is the Opening Feature at CFF. A 13-year-old aspiring journalist investigates his father’s mysterious murder within the boundaries of one of Kenya’s largest wildlife conservancies. As a ravaging drought encroaches, his quest to find the killer shifts as the collateral damage of a warming world is revealed.
🐋 One with the Whale (Sun. 9/22 at 2:30pm). What does it mean to come of age as an indigenous hunter in the time of social media? For the Indigenous people of St. Lawrence, food is scarce, and hunting whales is a matter of life or death. A heartwarming yet thrilling story of one family’s struggle to rebuild their shattered identities and regain a new foothold in both the ancient and modern world.
🌳 Hollow Tree (Sun. 9/22 at 4:45pm) is the Closing Feature at CFF. follows three teenagers coming of age in Louisiana. For the first time, they notice the Mississippi River’s engineering, stumps of cypress trees, and polluting refineries. Their different perspectives—as Indigenous, white, and Angolan young women—shape their story of the climate crisis. Screening supported by CEEZER.
And Now For Something Completely Different
🌎 Earth II (Sat. 9/21 at 8:15pm) is the greatest climate action movie never made. Compiled from a supercut of 90’s and 00’s disaster movies, Earth II is the climate blockbuster we’ve been waiting for… and that was already there all along.
👩🚀 Experimental Climate Shorts (Sun. 9/22 at 2:45pm). Show up for stop-motion astronauts, virtual worlds, generative AI, Borgesian archives, colorful creatures, and celebrate the boundless creativity and experimental spirit of contemporary storytelling.
🔥 Hot Takes: Climate Comedy (Sun. 9/22 at 5:00pm). Aliens, toxic reality stars, time travelers, bumbling energy execs, and Rollie Williams all on one screen. Even worse, they’ll all be there in person, too.
Stories of Activism and Grassroots Impact
🗽 Emergent City (Sat. 9/21 at 1:00pm) is a behind-the-scenes look at how NYC develops. The film tracks the development of Industry City in Sunset Park through the eyes of local activists, developers, and city politicians. Still have that unread copy of The Power Broker on your shelf? Come watch this instead.
💧 Dive in, Rise Up: Environmental Justice & Water (Sat. 9/21 at 3:15pm) one of the festival must-sees, an absolutely unmissable program on water and environmental justice from around the world. Screening supported by Climate Power.
✊ Power Shift: Defying Fossil Fuels (Sun. 9/22 at 12:30pm). How can you make a difference? These short films follow the moving journeys of activists against the odds, from the life-or-death stakes of defying oil companies in Nigeria to fighting for a gas ban in Oregon to a vow of silence that spoke louder than words.
Science & Innovation
👩🔬 Science & Solutions (Sat. 9/21 at 10:30am). Creating “ice stupas” from glacial meltwater, making food from the air, regrowing coral, saving parasites, and finding new seaweed stories are all part of this block. Come for science, solutions, and a dose of inspiration to start your weekend.
🧊 CANARY (Sat. 9/21 at 3:30pm) is a real-life adventure story for our times. Daring to seek Earth’s history contained in glaciers atop the tallest mountains in the world, Dr. Lonnie Thompson found himself on the frontlines of climate change—his life’s work evolving into a salvage mission to recover these priceless historical records before they disappear forever.
🏙️ An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet + Freetown: Cooling a City (9/22 at 10:00am). Are you into cities, resilience, and building decarbonization? This one’s for you. Want to see
Jamie LannisterNikolaj Coster-Waldau visit and learn about climate solutions in the built-environment around the world? Also for you.
Food & Farming
👩🏾🌾 Farming While Black & ᏗᏂᏠᎯ ᎤᏪᏯ (Meet Me at the Creek) (Sat. 9/21 at 10:30am) showcase stories of Black and Indigenous leaders reframing relationships to land. Farming While Black highlights New York farmers joyously reclaiming their agricultural heritage and building on farming practices that can heal people and the planet. ᏗᏂᏠᎯ ᎤᏪᏯ (Meet Me at the Creek) tells the story of a Cherokee waterkeeper as she leads the effort to restore a creek labeled as “irreversibly damaged.”
🌾 Common Ground (Sun. 9/22 at 11:45am) presents a hopeful and uplifting story of the pioneers of the “Regenerative Movement” who produce tremendous quantities of nutritionally dense food and are working to balance the climate—all while bringing our entire ecosystem back to life. Screening supported by Envest and Sound Future.
Global Perspectives Across Genres
😱 Trash, Terror, & Tomorrow: Eco-Anxiety at the Brink (Sat. 9/21 at 5:45pm) features plastic monsters, a Seoul so hot you can’t step outside, a young girl unravelling, an activist willing to die for her cause, a Bengladeshi river with a message, and an artist residency gone wrong. Catch these creative, inventive short films all confronting the deep anxiety and unease of the climate crisis.
🌏 Young Voices, Global Perspectives (Sun. 9/22 at 10:30am) highlights a mix of narrative and documentary shorts from early-career filmmakers. An activist struggles against the expansion of an oil refinery in his fishing village in Taiwan, a Moroccan cedar forest disappears, a gulf coast community deals with the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon, a young boy in Sindh dreams of a different climate, and New York’s harbor remembers its oyster-filled past.
🏔️ The Weight of Water: The Human Cost of Climate Crisis & Mountain Man (Sun. 9/22 at 5:00pm). Travel to the Himalayas for the evening with these two films. In Nepal, flooding and drought from global change have brought local tragedy and change. The Weight of Water shows the complex impact of climate change-fueled flooding and drought through three intimate, human stories. Mountain Man follows the only glaciologist in Bhutan as he travels to the remotest corners of the Bhutanese Himalayas to record the impacts of climate change.
See the full schedule here
How To Fest
We’re creating a hub for the weekend with food, panels, and conversation alongside our incredible lineup of films.
☕️ Coffee Collabs: Climate x Cinema
To bring the conversation out of the theater and into the city, we're pairing up filmmakers and climate professionals for a coffee as part of a program sponsored by Pique Action. Looking to expand your network or stretch your wings? Sign up here to share your knowledge and build new friendships.
📍Venues
Our primary venue is Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film at 87 Lafayette St. in TriBeCa. We’ll be there all day on Saturday, Sept. 21 and Sunday, Sept. 22. We’re taking over the whole Firehouse and will have four unique rooms:
Theater A is a gorgeous cinema space for feature films
Theater B is a creative screening room for our shorts programs and select features
The Solutions Hub is a public lounge with partner tables, coffee, and snacks
The Filmmaker Lounge hosts panels, workshops, films, and private events
Opening night is hosted in partnership with The Explorers Club at 46 E. 70th St on the Upper East Side, and our special Sunday screening of The Wild Robot will be at SVA Theatre, 333 W. 23rd St. in Chelsea.
⭐️ Filmmaker Lounge
Looking to bring climate to your set or production? Join us in the filmmaker lounge to meet other creatives, producers, and industry professionals and to hear from leaders in the field of climate filmmaking and sustainable production.
Panels & Workshops (Free!)
🌊 Telling Human Stories from Climate Frontlines (Sat. 9/21 at 11:00am). Join the visionary filmmaker behind Lowland Kids (2019) for an in-depth conversation about the urgency of climate storytelling.
✍️ Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change (Sat. 9/21 at 3:00pm). Join Good Energy for a one-hour workshop for writers, filmmakers, and industry members to explore how climate can be woven into any story, in any genre.
⚡️ Electrified and Fossil Free Productions (Sat. 9/21 at 4:30pm). Join Rewiring America for a panel on how to approach both on- and offscreen decisions around ditching fossil fuels on screen and on set.
🌅 Inspiring Climate Action: Entertainment’s Many Pathways to Impact (Sat. 9/21 at 6:00pm). Can entertainment help inspire the action we need to address climate change? Join Rare for a panel on the latest research on this topic, and discuss the varied pathways stories can take to make impact in the world.
🎞️ Putting Climate on Both Sides of the Camera (Sun. 9/22 at 11:00am). What can we do when making our next movie, TV series, or social media video to reduce our impact and emissions on set? Join Mari Jo Winkler, EP, True Detective: Night Country; Kati Johnson, EP, Bull; Heidi Kindberg, HBO; Emellie O’Brien, Earth Angel; and Stephanie Dawson, Producer for this must-attend panel.
💸 Crowdfunding to Build Independence (Mon. 9/23 at 12:00pm). Join Seed&Spark for an online workshop on how to have a successful crowdfunding campaign... and career! You’ll learn how to find your audience, structure your crowdfunding campaign, pick the right goal and incentives, and more.
🌎 Solutions Hub
Join us at the Solutions Hub for conversations, snacks, and Stumptown coffee. This is a lounge area to meet with friends before or after a program and to engage with organizations doing incredible work in the climate space. Stay tuned for more Solutions Hub announcements to come!
Saturday
Talk food and sustainability with Rethink Food and Re:Dish in the morning.
Then get the inside track on Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability and dive into culture with the Entertainment + Culture Pavilion
Spend the afternoon with WE ACT talking about heat justice in NYC and more.
Sunday
Catch Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability again if you missed them and talk coastal resiliency with Waterfront Alliance on Sunday morning
Grab 1:1 time in the afternoon with Rewiring America to learn how they can help you electrify all aspects of your production.
🥕 Food and Drink
Over the course of the weekend, we’ll have limited complimentary food and drink available for festival attendees at the Solutions Hub and for festival participants at the Filmmaker Lounge.
Enormous thanks to our wonderful in-kind partners:
🍫 Plant-based protein bars from Aloha
🫧 Probiotic sparkling water and kombucha from bear’s fruit
🥣 Sustainable containers and utensils from Eco-pliant
🍵 Tea from Just Ice Tea
🍯 Vegan honey from Mellody
💧 Canned water from Open Water
🍏 Healthy snacks from Precycle
😋 Plant-based charcuterie from Prime Roots
🧀 Vegan cheese from Rebel Cheese
🍽️ Reusable dishware from Re:Dish
🥗 Catering and snacks from Rethink Food
🥛 Plant-based wellness shakes from Remedy Organics
☕️ Coffee from Stumptown Coffee Roasters
🍫 Chocolate from Tony’s Chocolonely
🍷 Wine from Wölffer Estate
CFF’s 2024 Film Festival is made possible by our wonderful sponsors: the Guardian US, SNØCAP, Universal Pictures, The Carmack Collective Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, CEEZER, Rewiring America, Seaborne, Earth Angel by TheGreenShot (Sustainability Partner), Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability, Climate Power, Sound Future, Envest, Climate Tech Cities, Pique Action, The Live/Work/Walk Foundation, Buffy Redsecker and Alan Chung, Jason and Laurie Jeffay, and Laura Cook.
Thanks also to our network of in-kind sponsors who make this festival possible: All Arts (Local Media Partner), Betancourt Group, Edge Auto, Empact.fyi (Impact Partner), Entertainment + Culture Pavilion (Cultural Media Partner), The Everset, The Explorers Club, Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film, MR. HOSPITALITY, Romanette Legal, Studio Rodrigo and Cinema Rodrigo, Version Tomorrow, and Fernanda Uribe-Horta.
And that’s a wrap for now! Want a personal recommendation? Looking to learn more? Just reply and I’m happy to help!
And as a reminder: