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The inaugural Climate Film Festival unspools tonight leading into the opening of New York Climate Week with hundreds of events across the city as the United Nations General Assembly comes to order. Look for a celeb actor (under wraps until Monday) staffing a vegan hot dog truck near Union Square courtesy of Yellow Dot, the nonprofit production studio founded last year by Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up). The sauerkraut and mustard dog is called Coal and Gas Pollution are Responsible For One in Five Deaths Worldwide.
Yellow Dot also presents a New York version of its live LA show Let’s Not Die NY!! at Chelsea Music Hall.
Media and entertainment is a growing piece of Climate Week, launched and run for the last 15 years by international nonprofit Climate Group, which has its own agenda — opening night on Sunday — and affiliates with hundreds of other events. The Hollywood Climate Summit, a nonprofit and now well-attended annual event in Los Angeles, is east coast for the first time with Al Gore, Josh Gondelman and other media and climate folks gathering at the DGA Theater. The event kicks off with a screening of The White House Effect, a doc by Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and John Shenk that just premiered at Telluride. Elsewhere, studio execs and filmmakers will gather at Solutions House in NYC for panels on sustainable filmmaking and storytelling.
The Climate Film Festival, or CFF, hopes to become a mainstay and anchor, opening with 59 films culled from 300 submissions by a 15-member jury from both the film and climate worlds with narrative and doc features, shorts and episodic content.
A highlight is a special screening of The Wild Robot from DreamWorks Animation/Universal. “We are thrilled,” says Alec Turnbull, who founded CFF with art historian and curator J. English Cook.
“There are a number of big blockbusters that you can look at and say, yes, these certainly have climate themes.” The Wild Robot is one. There’s so much potential in “framing and opening up those conversations, very intentionally, but with works that are already out there, already being made,” he said. The animated survival drama is also a family film that “can really bring in this cross-generational conversation.” It opens theatrically September 27.
Turnbull and Cook, working with 10 founding volunteers, saw a great response to a festival soft launch with a few shorts last year so worked to roll out a bigger version in partnership with The Guardian U.S. and other sponsors.
“With the growing sense of the importance of climate and … the enormous numbers of great films, great artists, great filmmakers who are working in this space, we didn’t see anyone bringing it together in New York,” said Cook. “After having a few conversations around ‘Should we start this? Should we do it?’, we talked with friends, people in the climate community, people in the film community. No one seemed to know if there was something like this. So we started to throw it out into the world.”
Pat Swinney Kaufman, head of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment, will introduce the fest, which expects about 2,000 people to attend. Opening night is Nicole Gormley and Debra Aroko’s Searching for Amani, awarded the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director after its 2024 Tribeca Festival premiere. Doc Emergent City by Kelly Anderson and Jay Sterrenberg also played Tribeca. World premieres include Steve Liptay’s feature documentary Valve Turners and the big-screen opening of the Nikolaj Coster-Waldau-fronted docuseries An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet. Docs still dominate climate content, although that’s slowly shifting. Good Energy Studios will host a narrative climate writing workshop.
U.S. and international filmmakers will be on hand for opening night at The Explorers Club throughout screenings and panels at Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film.
