The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY)
10 Dec 2009
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College interrogates sustainability across all of its forms: economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, and aesthetic. The festival is in the spirit of UNESCO’s initiative on sustainable development that expanded environmental issues to explore the international interconnections between war, disease, health, genocide, the land, water, air, food, education, technology, cultural heritage, and diversity. Through film, video, new media, installation, performance, panels, and presentations, the festival engages interdisciplinary, vigorous dialogue. It links the local with the global. It showcases Ithaca College as an international center for thinking differently about the environment and sustainability.
How did your organization start?
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was launched in 1997 as the Center for the Environment outreach project at Cornell University. The festival, under director Christopher Riley, emerged as a major regional event in upstate New York. In 2004 Ithaca College was the major sponsor. In 2005 the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues. Professor of cinema, photography, and media arts Patricia Zimmerman and professor of politics Thomas Shevory are the codirectors of the festival.
What is special about your organization?
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival is more than a film festival. To serve our interdisciplinary mission, FLEFF screens a heterogeneous array of genres in feature narrative, documentary, and experimental from across the globe. We are particularly interested in indigenous media from other countries. We also mount four to five live music/silent film projection events, all original commissions. We produce a variety of concerts, ranging from experimental to classical to rock. We commission multimedia installations. We bring in writers for residencies and readings. Most significantly, we program new media with locative media artists, online exhibitions, alternate reality games, and FLEFF labs.
What is your organization currently working on that excites you?
This year, we are mounting an international new media project called OPEN SPACE. It is an exploration of the concept of fluidities, horizontality, collaborations, ecologies, and communities that open up enclosures in all domains. We've launched into a large social media and online art project with a very large virtual team from all over the globe: USA, Mexico, Spain, New Zealand, Nigeria, India, Brazil, Mongolia, Singapore, and Germany. We're running 18 blogs from across the globe exploring different aspects of open space--music, public health, politics, the arts. We're running an online art exhibition, MAP OPEN SPACE, and three user-generated contests. And, we're mounting an Alternate Reality Game exploring Open Space.
What is the future of your organization? What are you striving for?
The future of our organization is summed up in two words: partnerships and community. We have worked to establish partnerships in our local community with the local, Ithaca-based, non-profit art cinema, Cinemapolis. We are focused on our festival operating within a creative economies model to form alliances that promote economic sustainability in our upstate New York region. We have formed partnerships internationally with festivals/groups in India, Spain, and Mexico to exchange films. We have also worked to create community that spans academia, activism, arts, regional, international, faculty, students, businesses and locals by creating a plethora of opportunities at the festival for exchanges about films and topics that rethink environments.
What else do you want the media arts community to know about your organization?
Our mission is to create a festival that expands beyond film to all forms of media, new media, music, literature, journalism and the arts with the goal of pushing audiences to think differently about the environment. Our motto is heterogeneity--and opportunities to maximize public dialogue among different constituencies. We want to provoke international and interdisciplinary explorations of music, live projection, new media, social media and other new frontiers emerging and imagined.
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Location
350 Roy H. Park Hall, Ithaca, NY
United States
42° 25' 17.9004" N, 76° 29' 29.7096" W
