In these times of quarantine and social distancing, it can be tough to fill all the hours in your day. Climate champions who are used to participating in rallies and tree-planting campaigns may find the moratorium on public gatherings especially challenging as they do their best to stay sustainable at home.

To help combat cabin fever and keep you in touch with climate issues, biodiversity, and the world’s natural beauty, the C4C team has compiled a Film4Climate list of eco-friendly films and TV recommendations that you can stream at home!

Did you know Disney+ offers documentaries? We recommend: Into the Okavango, Before the Flood, Oceans, Penguins and America’s National Parks. Many of Disney’s kid-friendly feature films also include climate-positive messages. Try Brother Bear, Wall-E, Finding Nemo or Moana for your next family movie night.

If you’re looking to get your Netflix fix, they’re offering some eye-popping docs as well, including Chasing Coral, Terra, A Plastic Ocean, Cowspiracy, and Mission Blue. If you want something binge-worthy, try the stunning nature series Our Planet and Night on Earth. If you’d like a more allegorical take on the damage to our environment, check out Okja, a moving 2017 film from Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (Parasite, Snowpiercer). Down to Earth With Zac Efron is another option if you're looking for a series that will motivate you to take climate action while avoiding doom-and-gloom negativity.

Maybe you’re more into YouTube. As you might expect, options abound here. Feature film-wise, you’ve got beautiful contemporary options like Leave No Trace and Wild as well as classics like Hayao Miyakazi’s Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. YouTube is also the place to find a lot of serialized content, from TED Talks on climate change to web series like Climate Countdown, Antarctic Extremes, and Years of Living Dangerously. For assorted shorter-form climate content, consider giving our very own Connect4Climate channel a gander!

If you’re thinking about saying hello to Hulu, I Am Greta, featuring #Fridays4Future leader Greta Thunberg, is streaming there now! Hulu’s also the home of the whimsical Woman at War and the climate-colored disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. On HBO, we recommend An Apology to Elephants and Ice on Fire.

On top of all of the above? Amazon’s got a cornucopia of climate content too. From documentaries like Al Gore’s famous An Inconvenient Truth (and its sequel), the music-driven 1.5 Stay Alive, and Luc Jaquet’s Antarctica: Ice and Sky to dramatic offerings like the legal thriller Dark Waters, the old-school sci-fi Silent Running, and the fantastical adventure Beasts of the Southern Wild, it’s safe to say this platform’s got something for everyone. This Changes Everything offers a community-focused look at the economics of climate change and climate action, Tomorrow provides a positive perspective on how we can remake our world for the better, and The Human Element takes an intimate look at climate impacts in Middle America. You can find Years of Living Dangerously, a Connect4Climate collaboration, on Amazon too!

Last but not least, we encourage you to survey the online cinematic offerings of the D.C. Environmental Film Festival, as well as those of Films for the Earth and PBS. And if you happen to live in Mexico City, our partners at Ecocinema are bringing complimentary watch-from-your-window screenings to different parts of town!

Have fun, stay safe, stay sustainable, and stay climate-conscious! Let’s weather this storm together and come out the other side ready to stand up for our planet.

Every March, the D.C. Environmental Film Festival brings tens of thousands of filmgoers together in the U.S. capital for a celebration of both cinema and the planet we all call home. Mirroring the mission of C4C’s Film4Climate initiative, the DCEFF not only shares moving stories on the environment but promotes concrete action to help the planet, “inspiring understanding and stewardship… through the power of film.”

This year, the festival is presenting two Connect4Climate-supported productions: Slater Jewell-Kemker’s new cut of her climate action documentary Youth Unstoppable and Jared P. Scott’s trans-African environmental odyssey The Great Green Wall. Youth Unstoppable will be screened on March 15 at 7:00 PM EDT at the Carnegie Institution for Science and on March 19 at the same time at American University; The Great Green Wall will be presented at the Carnegie Institution on March 14 at 7:00 PM. The first Youth Unstoppable screening and the Great Green Wall screening will be followed by moderated discussions with the films’ respective directors.

Youth Unstoppable is a vivid on-the-ground account of the burgeoning worldwide Youth4Climate movement. Fastidiously compiled across an eleven-year span by Slater Jewell-Kemker, a youth climate activist in her own right who embarked on this ambitious project when she was just fifteen years old, the film speaks to the power of young people to seize control of their own futures and band together to push for sustainable policy as well as everyday lifestyle changes.

Get your Youth Unstoppable tickets BELOW or at https://bit.ly/3a8FF3U 

The Great Green Wall, executive produced by Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles, follows the journey of Malian music icon Inna Modja as she travels east to west across the Sahel region of Africa. Modja connects with those she meets along the way through song, and learns of the importance—both practical and symbolic—of the titular Great Great Wall campaign, an ambitious tree-planting movement aiming to create a wall of solid green across the heart of the continent. The film is produced by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) with the support of Connect4Climate and partners.

  Get your FREE Great Green Wall tickets BELOW or at https://bit.ly/3a8FF3U 

These two films embody Film4Climate’s commitment to communicating the urgent need for united climate action through the arts. Youth Unstoppable and The Great Green Wall offer poignant, humane perspectives on those directly impacted by climate change and challenge viewers to act themselves in the planet’s defense.

We hope you will join us for these screenings in Washington, D.C. next month.

Youth Unstoppable tickets

Great Green Wall FREE tickets

Banner/thumbnail image courtesy of Pixabay photographer Skeeze. 

The Creative Industries Pact for Sustainable Action was launched by the Green Spark Group in December 2019 at COP25 as a means of uniting organizations working in film, TV and beyond in a pledge to take action on a set of common climate goals. Already, more than 70 signatories—including public organizations, corporations, film schools, film commissions and more—have come on board, committing to reduce their environmental footprint in line with the targets of the Paris Agreement and with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

“Connect4Climate is a signatory to the Pact,” says Giulia Braga, Connect4Climate program manager. “We are proud to see how the foundational work by many has evolved, and how organizations are seeing the value in committing to common goals. We all agree that action is needed to reduce our impacts, and there’s strength in saying this and taking action collectively.”

Responding directly to the dire findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Pact asks that its endorsees work collaboratively within and across their various industries to keep global warming well below 2°C. This means establishing useful sustainability metrics, educating and empowering employees, cutting back on fuel consumption and other unclean energy use, embracing low-carbon materials and foods, and advocating outwardly for sustainable policymaking. The organizations that have signed on must report out on their progress every other year beginning with 2020.

On February 7, our Film4Climate team had the honor of hosting a panel discussion in Brussels at the first-ever European Co-Production Forum. Titled “A Green Light for Green Production” and moderated by Connect4Climate Program Manager Giulia Braga, this discussion assessed recent strides in sustainable production across the film and television industries, suggested next steps on how to boost international collaboration around sustainability, and addressed the need to see sustainable lifestyles better represented onscreen in narratives as well as behind the scenes.

The goals of the Pact dovetail perfectly with Film4Climate’s own mission to usher sustainable living into both the making of films and the stories they tell. We at Connect4Climate are excited to carry forward the momentum from Brussels and spread the dual messages of the Pact and Film4Climate worldwide to steer the entertainment industry toward a sustainable future.

All photography by Kaia Rose of the Connect4Climate Team.

Connect4Climate has long embraced the value of the creative arts as a means of spreading the messages of climate action and sustainability. Film4Climate, C4C’s initiative aimed at “greening the silver screen,” has found success supporting both climate-positive messaging in onscreen narratives and climate-positive practice in production cycles behind the scenes. On February 7, Film4Climate is proud to be hosting a panel at the first-ever European Co-Production Forum assessing the state of sustainable film production in Europe and laying out goals for the near future.

Film4Climate’s mission is embodied in the initiative’s International Charter, a document painstakingly compiled between 2013 and 2018 with inputs from film festivals, film commissions, producers, advocacy groups (such as EcoProd, PGA Green, Green Film Shooting, and Cine-Regio) and various cross-sections of the film industry. In 2019, Film4Climate’s mandate was bolstered when Connect4Climate partner Green Spark, led by Zena Harris out of Vancouver, launched the Creative Industries Pact for Sustainable Action, exhorting those in the creative industries to commit to furthering the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and to keeping net global temperature change below 2°C vis-à-vis pre-Industrial levels. The Pact’s many signatories include major universities and the World Economic Forum.

For the past several years, Film4Climate has been hard at work putting the principles behind the Charter and Pact into action, championing climate-positive films such as Slater Jewell-Kemker’s Youth Unstoppable and Jared P. Scott’s The Great Green Wall (starring beloved Malian singer Inna Modja) and hosting sustainability-minded contests like the Action4Climate film competition of 2014, the Global Video Competition of 2016, the #Uniting4Climate VR Pitch Competition in 2017, and Film4Climate’s annual Post-Production Award competition in partnership with Laser Film.

The Film4Climate team’s deep experience working with members of the industry on green production earned C4C an invitation to this year’s European Co-Production Forum, a first-of-its-kind event that will convene key players from all across the European film and TV sectors in Brussels for an open discussion of what values the production industry should embrace moving forward and how its members can work together to realize those ideals.

Film4Climate’s panel, titled A Green Light for Green Production and moderated by C4C Program Manager Giulia Braga, will play a vital role in framing the overarching conversation and driving further adoption of sustainable practices throughout the industry. Made up of Cine-Regio’s Charlotte Appelgren, the European Film Academy’s Mike Downey, Make Waves Productions’ Sarah Macdonald, and Creative Europe Media’s Lucía Recalde, the panel will discuss the recent progress of sustainable filmmaking in Europe and brainstorm strategies to scale up international collaboration and increase support for climate-related content in film moving forward.

Thumbnail, banner, and body images courtesy of Pixabay users Joaquin Aranoa, Dimitri Svetsikas and Erika Wittlieb, respectively.

COP25, this year’s vital UN conference on action against climate change, is now officially underway in Madrid, Spain under the aegis of the Chilean government.

In addition to opening avenues for online engagement with the COP through our Digital Media Zone and live social media coverage of our events on agriculture in Africa and youth leadership, we at Connect4Climate are hard at work expanding the reach of our Film4Climate initiative, using the creative arts as a means of catalyzing climate action worldwide.

For this year’s COP, given the dual involvement of Spain and Chile, we are making a concerted effort to spread the message of sustainability through film in the Spanish-speaking world.

In Chile, this year’s Connect4Climate post-production award will be presented at Conecta 2019, an industry event taking place alongside the COP from December 10 through 13. This award will recognize a Latin American filmmaker who submitted a film that resonates powerfully with one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and will ensure that the post-production on their film will be fully covered by Connect4Climate’s Rome-based partner, LaserFilm. C4C is presenting the award in collaboration with the Chilean Corporation of Documentary.

Meanwhile, young climate filmmaker Slater Jewell-Kemker is on the ground at the COP site in Madrid, where her groundbreaking documentary of the #Youth4Climate movement, Youth Unstoppable, was screened for a live audience at the Conference of Youth. Jewell-Kemker herself took to the stage to provide some context and commentary for the film, which documents the rise of a unified climate action movement across nations and profiles influential youth leaders such as Sweden’s Greta Thunberg.

Also on offer in Spain will be special screenings of climate-positive films from Cinema Planeta’s International Environmental Film Festival of Mexico. Taking place across the Saturdays December 7 and December 14, the COP25 showcase of Cinema Planeta films will “promote environmental protection from different perspectives” and will include such works as Maria Novaro’s Tesoros and Alberto Cortés’s El maíz en tiempos de guerra. Cinema Planeta is also hosting its own series of Youth Unstoppable screenings, beginning with a December 5 showing in Zaragoza and a December 11 showing in Valencia. Further Youth Unstoppable engagements are planned for venues in Madrid, Valladolid and the Canary Islands.

In Mexico itself, the message of #Film4Climate will be well represented during the COP at special screenings put on by the organizers of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG), the latest edition of which will be taking place from March 20-27, 2020 with support from the Connect4Climate team.

All of these assorted Film4Climate events are fitting accompaniments to the launch of the international Creative Industries Pact for Sustainable Action on December 2. The premise of the Pact is that “the creative industries can lead the way” on promoting sustainability “through collaboration on common goals” in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. C4C’s #Film4Climate initiative is a proud supporter of this Pact; in the words of senior C4C adviser Francis Dobbs, “This is needed now more than ever to help those who will inherit the planet build a livable future for themselves.”

If you’d like to learn more about C4C’s #Film4Climate initiative and its efforts past, present and future to green the silver screen, be sure to check out this profile (p.4-5) just published in the European Film Academy journal.

We need to be effective storytellers if we’re to rally behind meaningful climate action, and film is a medium that allows us to drive home the humanity of the climate crisis and prove to hearts and minds everywhere that the #TimeForAction is now.

Banner and thumbnail images courtesy of Pixabay. All other photos courtesy of the Connect4Climate team.