Our Sustainable Future - CSU, Chico

When is a film festival more than just another film festival?

When it’s Chico’s own Ch•Eco Film Fest, a “festival of environmental film and art” that brings into sharper focus the broad concept of sustainability.

The purpose of the Ch·Eco Film Fest is to inform, educate, and inspire people about the environment through the exceptional media of film and art, according to Jennifer Rotnem, chair of the festival’s organizing committee.

“The point of the festival is to explore new places and ideas,” Rotnem says, pointing to the festival’s emphasis on sustainability. “Together we need to find ways to balance the needs of our economy, our society, and the natural environment so people can prosper, generation after generation, while respecting and sustaining the earth.”

The Ch·Eco Film Fest is “a unique partnership between the University and the community,” designed to promote downtown Chico as well as attract people to the event itself. “The idea came from Jeff Price in environmental sciences, who is also an amateur wildlife filmmaker,” Rotnem says. “The Chico Sustainability Group had a similar idea, so instead of developing two competing events we decided to join forces.”

The festival transcends typical film festival territory. Festival goers watched thoughtful films, met a director or two, and learned more about featured topics. But they also attended art workshops to learn how to transform trash into art, created animal spirit masks, and wrote poetry. Galleries around town exhibited environmental art, and various venues hosted performance art, music, and entertainment. The Ch·Eco Film Fest offered family-friendly fare, too, from Captain Planet cartoons on Saturday morning to Plaza Art Day on Sunday afternoon. Even high school students fully engaged, writing and filming 30-second “ads” that encourage environmental responsibility.

The Ch·Eco Film Fest was co-hosted by a number of organizations, beginning with California State University, Chico, dedicated to sustainable development as a means of balancing human social, cultural, and economic needs with the natural environment. Also co-hosting were the Chico Sustainability Group, whose mission is “to explore, support, and inspire practices and activities that ensure a prosperous, healthy community where people and nature thrive harmoniously, now and in the future”; Friends of the Arts, the state/local partner to the California Arts Council since 2001, whose mission is “to create a path to our cultural heritage and to the future through the arts” and whose other major projects include Artoberfest for the city of Chico and Annie’s Arts Awards; and the Sierra Club Yahi Group, committed to “exploring, enjoying, and protecting the wild places of the earth” and representing the 1,500 members of the Sierra Club in the northern California counties of Butte, Glenn, Lassen, Plumas, and Tehama.

Admission to most films and events offered as part of the Ch·Eco Film Fest were free. For more information about this year's festival, including a complete description of films and a comprehensive festival schedule, see www.checofilmfest.org.

Special Events, Speakers, and a Kids Program
The five-day festival kicked off with keynote speaker Denis Hayes, co-founder of Earth Day in 1970 and now chair of the Earth Day Network as well as current president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, a $100 million environmental foundation located in Seattle. An environmental lawyer by training, Hayes has published more than 100 articles, books, and papers on energy and the environment. The National Audubon Society included him in its list of the 100 Environmental Heroes of the 20th Century.

During the Carter Administration Hayes headed the federal Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). He is or has been a trustee or director of Stanford University, Greenpeace USA, the World Resources Institute, the American Solar Energy Society, the Federation of American Scientists, the Energy Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters, the Humane Society of the United States, the National Programming Council for Public Television, CERES, and Children Now.

Earlier Wednesday a daylong select festival screening, the Ch·Eco Film Fest @ Butte College, was offered at the main Butte Community College campus, though the festival’s official film kickoff came Thursday night with Maquilapolis, a documentary about (and by) workers in Tijuana’s multinational assembly plants, the maquiladoras. A collaboration between filmmaker Vicky Funari, artist Sergio De La Torre, and the Tijuana women's organization Grupo Factor X, Maquilapolis is hosted by the Environmental Action Resource Center (EARC) at CSU, Chico. Sergio De La Torre, the film’s producer and director, appeared in person to discuss the film and answer audience questions.

Hosted by Adventure Outings at CSU, Chico, the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour was screened as part of the festival on Friday night—an internationally acclaimed film competition that captures the spirit of the mountains with magnificent cinematography.

Festival events scheduled during the day on Thursday and Friday also included the children’s film Here’s My Question: Where Does My Garbage Go? and kids’ recycling-related educational activities (teacher reservations required) hosted by CSU, Chico Associated Students Recycling and the Northern California Natural History Museum.

Other special Ch·Eco Film Fest screenings scheduled during the day on Thursday and Friday, these accompanied by guest lectures on specific topics offered by CSU, Chico professors and other experts. Among these are The Corporation with guest lecturer Tracy McDonald; Ripe for Change with lecturer Lee Altier; Quartzite’s Fall: A Wilderness Tale with Randy Larsen; and The End of Suburbia with Kirk Monfort.

The Ch·Eco Film Fest Extravaganza!
Then there is the main show—the festival’s multi-day “extravaganza” of films, were screened all day and all night Saturday at Chico’s Pageant Theatre and also at the edge of the CSU, Chico campus in Ayres 106. Most feature films were shown twice, the different screening days and times offered the chance for most people to see most of the films. A variety of animated and other short features were shown in between the main features, and Captain Planet cartoons were screened in both venues on Saturday morning.

Among featured films at the first annual Ch·Eco Film Fest is Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story, a documentary narrated by Harrison Ford that recounts the exceptional life of a woman who grew up in frontier Alaska, married a pioneer arctic biologist, and dedicated her life to the protection of the magnificent wild lands she so passionately loves.

A Life Among Whales weaves together natural history and biography as it explores the life and work of whale biologist and activist Roger Payne, who discovered in the early 1970s that whales sing “songs.” The film explores Payne’s tireless and passionate fight to ban whaling—a ban which today, 20 years after an international moratorium was imposed, is threatened—and follows him to his present-day study of ocean pollution and his work with The Ocean Alliance, a non-profit organization and global leader in whale research and conservation.

Nobelity offers a stunning look at the world’s most pressing problems through the eyes of nine Nobel Laureates. The filmmaker’s personal journey to find enlightened answers about the kind of world our children and grandchildren will know is filed across the United States. and in France, England, India, and Africa.

The Queen of Trees reveals the importance of an unlikely partnership between a regal fig tree in Kenya and a tiny wasp—one of nature’s oddest, entirely interdependent couples. Without the wasp, the tree could not pollinate its flowers and produce seeds. Without the fig, the wasp would have nowhere to lay its eggs. The tree provides food and shelter for a huge variety of animals, however, including gray hornbills, Africa's largest bird. In a surprising turn, some insects even come to the tree’s aid—sparking a battle you won't want to miss.

The film Black Gold will help many people wake up and smell the coffee. Multinational coffee companies now dominate an industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. But while we in California continue to pay top dollar for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.