Ocean Literacy · Film

The Climate Film Festival Returns, and the Ocean Runs Through the Programme

The third edition runs 18 to 21 September during Climate Week NYC, with 52 films, 33 premieres, a full day of industry programming, and marine subjects from opening night through to the closing credits.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

The Climate Film Festival returns to New York for a third edition from Friday 18 to Monday 21 September, timed to run alongside Climate Week NYC. Four days of screenings move between the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Regal Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side and Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn, with filmmaker conversations, free public events, a live pitch competition and industry sessions on screenwriting, financing and distribution, impact measurement and sustainable production. For readers who work on the water, the notable thing about this year’s selection is how much of it is set there.

The festival puts the programme at 52 films with 33 premieres in the body of its announcement, and at 53 films in the same announcement’s subheading. The published selection list carries 52 titles. Of last year’s edition the festival says it drew more than 3,000 attendees and presented 50 films, and that the first Narrative Change Summit convened more than 800 people from nonprofits, media organisations, foundations and the private sector. Those figures are the festival’s own and are not independently audited.

Opening night: a fisherman against the trawlers

The festival opens on Friday 18 September at the Museum of the Moving Image with the East Coast premiere of House of Fish, directed by Santiago Burin des Roziers. The festival describes it as the story of Paolo Fanciulli, a Tuscan fisherman and environmental activist fighting to protect the Mediterranean from illegal bottom trawling. A trailer is available on Vimeo.

Fanciulli’s project, La Casa dei Pesci, has lowered carved marble blocks onto the sea floor off Talamone, where they sit as obstacles that snag and tear illegal trawl nets. Reporting on the project by the New York Times, NPR and Euronews records that Italian authorities dropped concrete blocks in the area in 2006, that Fanciulli judged them too few and too widely spaced, and that he went on to secure marble from a Carrara quarry and sculptures donated by artists including Emily Young and Beverly Pepper. It is an enforcement measure that happens to look like an art installation, and it arrives on screen while bottom trawling in European protected areas is under sustained political scrutiny.

Centrepiece and closing night

The centrepiece screening on Saturday 19 September is The Keeper, from the veteran environmental documentarian Jon Bowermaster, at Regal Essex Crossing, which the festival frames as a portrait of local New York environmental figures. The festival closes on Sunday 20 September at Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn with the New York City premiere of Abby Ellis’s The Lake, followed by the awards.

What is in the programme for ocean audiences

Ages of Ice: The Polar Seas, directed by Karina Holden, has its world premiere in the episodics strand and is the most directly polar title in the selection. The short documentary section is where the marine and freshwater films cluster. It includes The Herring Queen by Eilidh Munro, Fish for the Future by Matthew Benton, The Coral Rescuers by Jason Spingarn-Koff, Sound Guardians by Leah Varjacques, Glacier Speak: Listening to Matanuska by Max Romey, SILA by Ciril Jazbec and Lucía Flórez, Hidden Paradise by Kawin Sirichantakul, How to Plant a Lake by Satomi Blair and CG Foisy, and What The River Knows by Diego Riley and Will Buckley. The experimental Tectonics strand adds Velella Velella by James DeLisio, named for the sailing hydrozoan that strands in mass beachings along Pacific coasts.

At a moment when climate communication is being tested, we need stories that invite people in rather than shut them out.

Alec Turnbull, co-founder, Climate Film Festival

The Narrative Change Summit

The summit returns for a second year on Monday 21 September at the SVA Theatre, a full day bringing together filmmakers, foundations, creative agencies, nonprofit leaders and climate communicators to work on strategies for reshaping climate narratives. The agenda had not been announced when the lineup was released. For conservation communicators this is the part of the week most likely to be directly useful, and the part where the usual scepticism applies: convenings about narrative are easy to hold and hard to evaluate.

The jury

Twenty-three jurors are drawn from film, journalism, philanthropy, food systems and environmental justice. They include Gabrielle Canon, senior climate reporter at the Guardian; Abré Conner, who directs the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice; Wawa Gatheru of Black Girl Environmentalist; Julián Etienne of Doc Society’s Climate Story Fund; the meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus; Sonia Shechet Epstein of the Museum of the Moving Image; Sam Read of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance; and Nancy Rosenthal of the New York WILD Film Festival. The festival was co-founded by Alec Turnbull and J. English Cook, and is fiscally sponsored by Ecologistics, a 501(c)(3) organisation.

Why it matters here

Film festivals do not stop trawlers, restore seagrass or fund fisheries observers. What a programme like this can do is put marine subjects in front of an audience of funders, broadcasters, policy staff and journalists during the busiest climate week of the year, at a scale that conference posters and journal articles rarely reach. Whether that attention converts into anything measurable is exactly the question the Narrative Change Summit exists to ask, and it is worth attending with that question in hand rather than assuming the answer.

The full schedule and tickets are at climatefilmfest.com.

About the Climate Film Festival

A nonprofit cultural organisation and annual New York City film festival held during Climate Week NYC. Founded in 2023, it works year round with filmmakers, artists, communities, advocates, policymakers and sustainability leaders through screenings, filmmaker conversations, public programmes and the Narrative Change Summit.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean