Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

About the Event

Bring Them Home

Ivan MacDonald / Ivy MacDonald / Daniel Glick, USA, 2024, 85 mins

Bring Them Home examines the deeply meaningful role that buffalo played in Blackfeet life prior to the arrival of settlers who nearly eradicated wild buffalo in an effort to eradicate the Blackfeet people. For Blackfeet, the buffalo are seen not only as fundamental to a healthy ecosystem, but as spiritual relatives. Their removal from the land meant the loss of the Blackfeet way of life, the trauma of which still reverberates today. In the present, the film focuses on Ervin Carlson, director of the Blackfeet Buffalo Program and Paulette Fox, co-creator of the Iinnii Initiative, who join forces with non-native conservation groups, such as the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York City, who recognize the buffalo as a keystone species not only for Blackfeet lands, but for North America’s ecological stability. Narrated by Lily Gladstone.

Time: 1:00pm

Borderland - The Line Within

Pamela Yates, USA, 2024, 110 mins

The United States border is not just a geographic location. The border is everywhere. It lies within every undocumented immigrant family with the threat that at any moment they can be captured, incarcerated, deported; their lives destroyed. Borderland | The Line Within not only exposes the profitable business of immigration and its human cost, but weaves together the stories of immigrant heroines and heroes resisting and showing a way forward, intent on building a movement in the shadow of the border industrial complex, recognizing the human rights of all.

Time: 3:30pm

Single-Use Planet

Steve Cowan, USA, 2024, 59 mins

Plastic is vital in so many ways to our modern way of life and well-being—but not all forms of it. In search of why more and more single-use plastic debris enters the ocean despite all efforts to recycle, SINGLE-USE PLANET goes upstream to where millions of tons of raw plastic are being made amidst the ruins of America's bygone steel industry in Pennsylvania. Further upstream, we see the economic and political realities that have boosted the new industry—realities reaching all the way to rural Louisiana where plans are laid to build the biggest plastic plant in the world. Can the powerful industry be persuaded to temper their production of single-use plastic? Our search leads to Washington D.C.—where a federal bill to regulate the industry remains stalled—and finally to France, where the prohibition of campaign donations by corporations may provide a key to the effective reduction of plastic pollution.

Time: 6:00pm

Sleep With Your Eyes Open

Nele Wohlatz, Brazil / Taiwan / Argentina / Germany, 2024, 97 mins

A coastal city in Brazil. Kai arrives from Taiwan for holidays with a broken heart. A broken air conditioner sends her into Fu Ang’s umbrella store. He could become a friend, but the rainy season doesn't arrive and his shop disappears. While looking for Fu Ang, Kai discovers the story of Xiaoxin and a group of Chinese workers in a posh skyscraper. Kai finds herself strangely mirrored in Xiaoxin’s tale.

Time: 8:30pm

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