DC Environmental Film Festival
The [Conserv]atives Teaser Trailer
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Learn and start reserving tickets at dceff.org!
If a single photo can inspire change, how influential are a million images? Over the course of the 15-year Extreme Ice Survey project, photographer James Balog and his team brought some of the world’s first and most compelling visual evidence of climate change to the global stage as he depicted the rapid melting of glaciers around the world. Thoughtfully helmed by acclaimed director Jeff Orlowski-Yang (Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, The Social Dilemma) and first-time filmmaker Sarah Keo, Chasing Time is a meditative exploration of time and mortality, following James and his crew as they bring the decades-long project to a close, cataloging more than one million images in the process. The short documentary reunites James and the Emmy-award-winning team behind Chasing Ice to capture the end of the epic undertaking and spotlight the power of an intergenerational effort to seed hope and inspire action toward a sustainable future. A beautiful tribute to the power of images and the importance of mentorship, the team examines the legacy their efforts have made on the world.
Directed by Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Sarah Keo
On January 12, 1995 wolves returned to Yellowstone, 50 years after their extirpation. Mollie Beattie, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, carried the first Canadian born wolf into The Park’s experimental acclimation enclosure, Alpha Female Wolf No. 5. From that day forward, their lives would be forever connected. This is the true story of Mollie’s Pack and the return of wolves to the World's First National Park.
Directed by Thomas Winston
This impressionist hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital. Now their specter haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, Holding Back The Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival.
Directed by Emily Packer
Are we becoming PLASTIC PEOPLE?
Our ground-breaking feature documentary investigates the growing threat of microplastics on human health. Almost every bit of plastic ends up ground down into “microplastics”. These microscopic particles drift in the air, float in the water and sit in the soil. And now, leading scientists are finding them in our bodies: our organs, our blood, and even the placentas of new mothers. What is the impact of these invisible invaders on our health? Ziya Tong, author and science journalist is determined to find out. Ziya makes it personal by visiting leading scientists and undergoing, for the first time on camera, experiments in her home, on her food, and on her body. This documentary ventures far beyond the known issues of plastic and goes straight to the human drama of the future of our health and the potential dangers of becoming Plastic People.
Directed by Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong
An exhilarating window into the world of a northern California bird rescue center and the people who give wildlife a second chance.
Directed by Derek Knowles
In a world teetering on the brink of environmental catastrophe, BEEN HERE STAY HERE emerges as a profound reflection on our collective crossroads. For nearly 250 years, a small crabbing community in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay has weathered relentless change. Since 1850, two-thirds of their island has succumbed to rising sea levels, and experts predict that within two decades, the islanders may be forced to abandon their ancestral home. Tangier Island stands as a canary in the coal mine, foreshadowing the fate of countless other coastal communities facing similar threats.
Though the narrative is undeniably sobering, the film illuminates a beacon of hope, showcasing the enduring power of faith, resilience, and community in the face of adversity. Tangier Island’s story is not just its own but a cautionary tale for many coastal communities around the world.
Directed by David Usui
Bring Them Home tells the story of a small group of Blackfoot people and their mission to establish the first wild buffalo herd on their ancestral territory since the species’ near-extinction a century ago, an act that would restore the land, re-enliven traditional culture and bring much needed healing to their community.
Directed by Ivan MacDonald, Ivy MacDonald, and Daniel Glick
This is a film about Atlanta based artist Michi Meko whose life is expressed in multiple layers of mystical meaning. His art attempts to answer the question – What is his place is in this unfamiliar world of nature and wilderness and how does his art define and exhibit a newly fused relationship between his past and a radically new and radiant expression? Michi found his place and voice in nature as a fly fisherman and outdoor enthusiast. Michi Meko’s journey inspires a new mindset and new possibilities for everyone but especially African Americans. Michi's journey comes to life in a complex topographical language of his art that leverages icons and objects of the past while inventing a new iconographic language for the future.
Directed by Chad Brown
For Henry, the community garden is his escape from the daily toil in the city. However, the day has come for it to be demolished. Henry and his community can't agree on how to save it.
Directed By Eloise Jenninger
From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Rosanna Xia and Academy Award®-winning L.A. Times Studios, OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT is a cinematic exposé of an environmental disaster lurking just off the coast of Southern California.
Not far from Catalina Island, aboard one of the most-advanced research ships in the world, David Valentine discovered a corroded barrel on the seafloor that gave him chills. The full environmental horror sharpens into greater clarity once he calls Los Angeles Times journalist Rosanna Xia, who pieces together a shocking revelation: In the years after World War II, as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been quietly dumped into the ocean – and the consequences continue to haunt the world today.
Directed by Rosanna Xia and Daniel Straub
Music by James Ellington
In 1965 Iain Douglas-Hamilton arrived in Tanzania to study African elephants. Later joined by his wife Oria and daughters Saba and Dudu, Iain and his family lived alongside elephants with matriarch Boadicea and gentle young mother Virgo cherished like human relatives. As the first scientist to study the social behaviour of wild elephants, Iain’s work became the benchmark for everything we know about the animals today. This inspiring documentary follows Iain as he makes an emotional return to Samburu following a life-threatening accident. Accompanied by his friend and protégé David Daballen, Iain revisits his incident-packed life as he catches up with the elephants that are so close to his heart. Featuring powerful contributions from his wife, daughters and fellow pioneering zoologist Jane Goodall – A LIFE AMONG ELEPHANTS shows how sometimes you have to stand alone to protect what you love.
Directed by Nigel Pope
Brandon and Royal are among a small group of firefighters in California who were trained while incarcerated and managed to break through and become professional firefighters post-release, but that’s not the story for most of their peers. After securing their own careers, they decided to take matters into their own hands and start their own nonprofit and fire department. Firebreak follows Brandon, Royal and their third group of trainees as they make their way through Brandon and Royal’s tough training program.
Directed by Kenzie Bruce
See more photos on our Flickr page: www.flickr.com/photos/dceff
Just some of the names featured include our amazing special guests: Alex Honnold, Sarah Kaplan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., Mustafa Santiago Ali, Merlin Sheldrake, Rep. Adam Schiff, Luc Jacquet, Leah Penniman, Karen Washington, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Charlie Hamilton James, Dr. Heidi Sevestre, Edivan Guajajara, and Juliet Eilperin.
The 2024 Festival took place from March 21-30 at venues across DC, including Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the MLK Memorial Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the U.S. Naval Memorial, the National Academy of Sciences, as well as other embassies, universities, museums, and cultural institutions.
Learn more about DCEFF and sign up for updates at dceff.org. 2025 dates will be announced soon.
Go check out dceff.org for more info and to start signing up for screenings!
Almost like a final journey to a vanishing continent and its inhabitants, director Luc Jacquet returns to the South Pole for a visually striking adventure.
An unconventional story of a South Dallas skatepark whose mission is to change the lives of everyone who walks through the gate. 4DWN chronicles the past and present lives of the Park’s founders and one budding young skateboarder who finds kinship and camaraderie at this skatepark-turned-urban farm.
Directed by Danny Schmidt
An emerging crisis in one of the last remaining rainforests in Central America ignites a heroic mission in PATROL. When illegal cattle ranchers decimate large swaths of rainforest, indigenous rangers join forces with an American conservationist and undercover journalists to expose the dark world of conflict beef.
Directed by Camilo de Castro & Brad Allgood
Examines the historical plight of Black farmers in the U.S. and the rising generation reconnecting with their ancestral roots.
Directed by Mark Decena
A thrilling yet heartwarming story of one family’s struggle to rebuild their shattered identities and find a way to live with Ancient Indigenous values in the fast-paced, cruel modern world.
Nóouhàh-Toka’na, known as swift fox in English, once roamed the North American Great Plains from Canada to Texas. Like bison, pronghorn and other plains animals, Nóouhàh-Toka’na held cultural significance for the Native Americans who lived alongside them. But predator control programs in the mid-1900s reduced the foxes to just 10 percent of their native range.
Directed by Roshan Patel
BATSIES is a short, experimental doc that examines a woman’s tender relationship with an animal that’s quintessentially feared and loathed – the bat.
Directed by Elizabeth Unger
Indigenous people and salmon have been intertwined for thousands of years in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Today, kids learn from elders to fish but must also learn to fight, as pollution from Pebble Mine threatens this pristine ecosystem. Can the next generation defend the most prolific salmon run left on earth?
Directed by Colin Arisman and Oliver Sutro
Visit www.SaveBristolBay.com to learn more about Bristol Bay watershed conservation.
A sci-fi experimental documentary which explores the first ecosystem in Europe to gain legal rights: the Mar Menor lagoon.
Directed by Isabelle Carbonell
When her father dies unexpectedly, Dr. Ayne Amjad is thrust to the helm of a decades-long struggle to aid a southern West Virginia town beset by cancer-causing chemicals. Haunted by her late father’s mandate to “help others” at all costs, Ayne is caught between her dream of raising a family and an audacious but all-consuming plan to relocate the town and bring closure to her father’s work.
Directed by Scott Faris & Meg Griffiths
Migration season is when Annette Price and the other Chicago Collision Bird Monitors are the busiest as mother nature literally slams into the indoors. Annette assembles volunteers as they arrive downtown before sunrise, looking for birds that have flown into skyscrapers for hours before heading to their day jobs.
Directed by Erika Valenciana & Mitchell Wenkus
Acid mine drainage is a pervasive problem in American Appalachia, poisoning streams and killing wildlife. The technology and funding to remove these pollutants and bring life back to streams just didn't exist, that is until fine art painter and professor John Sabraw rallied a team to address the issue in their local stream and developed a breakthrough process to upcycle pollutants into paint pigments. It's amazing what humans are capable of when their actions are relentlessly committed, creative and cooperative.
Directed by Jason Whalen
Follows the intimate journey of indomitable Hispanic cancer survivor Tina Cordova who has catalyzed a movement seeking justice for the forgotten residents of southern New Mexico – mostly Hispanic and Native – who suffer multigenerational cancers they tie to the secret poisoning of their land by the Trinity Bomb.
Directed by Lois Lipman
Norfolk, Virginia is sinking, yet there is no public plan to prevent it from going underwater. The local government's only action so far–investing in what is labeled a “climate resilience” plan to tear down public housing and redevelop a historic Black community, the St. Paul’s district.
Directed by Dream Hampton
On a remote Icelandic island, teenagers Birta and Selma rescue pufflings (young puffins) from imminent danger as pufflings leave their nests for the first time.
Directed by Jessica Bishopp
On a remote Icelandic island, teenagers Birta and Selma rescue pufflings (young puffins) from imminent danger as pufflings leave their nests for the first time.
Directed by Jessica Bishopp
Witness the extraordinary life of Dr. Lonnie Thompson, an explorer who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what is possible. Daring to seek Earth's history contained in glaciers atop the tallest mountains in the world, Lonnie found himself on the frontlines of climate change—his life's work evolving into a salvage mission to recover these priceless historical records before they disappear forever.
Directed by Danny O'Malley & Alex Rivest, PhD
Much of life on Earth is connected by a vast, hidden network, that we are only just beginning to understand. Out of sight, between the world of plants and animals, another world exists - the kingdom of fungi.
Directed by Joseph Nizeti, Gisela Kaufmann
In 1971 John Francis, known the world over as ‘Planetwalker,’ witnessed an oil tanker collision in the San Francisco Bay. The sight of oiled birds on the shoreline caused him to give up motorized transport and rely solely on his own two feet. Months after that he took a vow of silence convinced that listening rather than adding fuel to any fire was the way ahead.
He didn’t talk, but he kept on walking clear across the country and back again. During the next seventeen silent years he listened and studied the world around him.
Directed by Dominic Gill & Nadia Gill
In sym-bee-o-sis, scientists discover that the alliance between bees and plants depends on an unexpected third partner: microbes! But the chemicals we use in agriculture are putting this ancient partnership at risk.
Directed by Neil Losin
Explores urgent efforts to recover endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales of the Pacific Northwest, through the eyes of one of their human champions, researcher Ken Balcomb, who passed away in 2022.
Directed by Jessica Plumb
On December 25, 2021, the world lost one of its greatest scientists and the "godfather of biodiversity," Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. Join his family and several of his closest friends and colleagues on an educational journey and heartfelt mission of love and hope as they travel together to return Dr. Lovejoy's ashes to the magical place where he devoted his life to understanding and protecting the Amazon rainforest.
Directed by Greg Hemmings
What goes into conducting a population census and how does it inform conservation decisions? And how is that information gathered for the fastest land animal on earth? Counting Cheetahs follows a team of biologists and volunteers in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya as they begin a cheetah census to inform the Conservancy's future conservation efforts.
Directed by Maggie Dewane and Ashley Holmes
Vidal Merma, a Peruvian Indigenous journalist, risks his life daily to secure a future where his son, Erik, can savor the simple joy of drinking clean water. “Wings of Dust” illuminates a father's sacrifice, community resilience, and the unwavering human spirit in the face of environmental injustice.
Directed by Giorgio Ghiotto
The Taiga, also known as the boreal forest, represents about 17% of the Earth's surface and has the highest density of rivers and natural springs in the world. In Mongolia, its primary forests and pure waters have kept an entire population nomadic on its lands for thousands of years. But for more than 30 years, the rich natural resources of these Mongolian lands have fallen prey to illegal hunters and miners, often from the local population.
Directed by Hamid Sardar
When a university student struggling with an environmental studies assignment searches for inspiration at an art gallery, she is magically transported into a painting and lands in 19th-century Japan. There, she witnesses the sustainable practices that helped the country overcome environmental collapse.
Directed by Hiroshi Yokota
The Night Visitors is a movie about moths. In large and small fragments, looking both inward and out, through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely examines these underknown creatures. While The Night Visitors is interested in moths as organisms, with fascinating life histories, staggering biodiversity, and a functional importance as indicators of climate change and habitat degradation, its engagement with them is not primarily entomological. Instead, the film looks at moths as aesthetic beings and as carriers of meaning, aiming for a deep encounter with the beauty and incommensurability of the profoundly other.
Directed by Michael Gitlin
Follows Indigenous forest guardian Marçal Guajajara and activist Puyr Tembé as they fight to protect their territories from deforestation, an illegal logger who has no choice but to cut the forest down, and a large landowner at the mercy of thousands of invaders and extractive industry.
Directed by Camilo de Castro & Brad Allgood.
This panel discusses the documentary COME HELL OR HIGH WATER: THE BATTLE FOR TURKEY CREEK.
Featuring: Sloane Kali Faye, PhD (Race Forward), Leah Mahan, (Director, Come Hell or High Water), Katherine T. Egland (NAACP Board Chair of Environmental and Climate Justice), and Brian Joyner (National Park Service, Rock Creek Park)
Film synopsis: When the graves of former slaves are bulldozed in Mississippi, a native son returns to protect the community they settled.
Featuring: Carlton Eley (Race Forward), Sarah Grohnert, Director, Ever the Land, and Rafael DeLeon (Office of International and Tribal Affairs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Ngāi Tūhoe, one of New Zealand’s Māori tribes, initiated a landmark architectural undertaking. In 2014, Ngāi Tūhoe completed construction on Te Uru Taumatua based on the standards of The Living Building Challenge. The documentary EVER THE LAND explores: the relationship between people and their land; the implementation of a broader community vision; and sustainability solutions that center equity.
This panel revisits Ngāi Tūhoe’s accomplishments for this project; explores how the development project and the film are resetting conversations about sustainability; and surfaces key lessons from spatial planning that attempts to balance the needs of community development and cultural development.
The 32nd Annual DCEFF will run March 21st through 30th and offer screenings of today's best and most timely environmental films. Learn more at dceff.org/.
DCEFF’s lineup of Earth Day Encores includes all of their 2023 shorts programs and a handful of exciting and unique feature-length film Selections. All of these will be available to stream FOR FREE from Tuesday, April 18, through Sunday, April 23.
To see the full lineup and RSVP, visit: dceff.org
Featuring Diana Kushner and Stephen Smith (Co-directors, Beneath the Polar Sun), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Rhode Island), and Amanda Lynch (Sloan And George Lindeman Jr. Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University).


