Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival 2020
Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival is a new film festival taking place in Abu Dhabi in Manarat Al Saadiyat between February 6-8, 2020, organised by the Environment Agency - Abu Dhabi and Zayed University.
The festival aims to engage and provoke critical thinking about issues related to the environment and to encourage and inspire viewers to take action in anyway they can.
The first edition will focus on waste and pollution.
From food waste to e-waste to plastics, the festival aims to enhance the audience’s evolving definition of waste and to adopt a more profound way of thinking about our lifestyle and climate change.
The films reveal our most sensitive debates around economics, tolerance, and justice for planet Earth.
The festival includes a series of talks and film screenings, all free to attend. You can register here. Below is the line up of events and you can visit www.alsidreff.com for more information.
Thursday, February 6:
3.00pm: AL SIDR FESTIVAL ROUNDTABLE
A roundtable discussion featuring public intellectuals and activists from NYUAD, Art Jameel, and Zayed University highlighted by the well-known scholar and curator Carylon Jones (MIT). Co-chaired by Nezar Andary and Nadia Christidi.
6.00pm: ART EXHIBITION
7.00-10.00pm: PRESENTATION OF EMIRATES NATURAL HISTORY GROUP’S JANE MEIKLE ON BIRDS OF THE UAE + FILM SCREENING
ALBATROSS (Chris Jordan)
2018 | 97 mins | English with Arabic subtitles
ALBATROSS is a powerful visual journey into the heart of an astonishingly symbolic environmental tragedy. On one of the remotest islands on our planet, tens of thousands of baby albatrosses lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic. A beautiful multi-layered metaphor for our times.
Friday, February 7:
3.00pm: FILM SCREENING
WELCOME TO SODOM (Christian Krönes and Florian Weigensamer)
2018 | 92 mins | English with Arabic subtitles
The world’s biggest electronic waste dump is in Ghana, and it’s teeming with people who rummage, collect, recover, and burn e-waste. An impressive and disconcertingly apocalyptic tableau on work within a whole new economic sector.
4:30pm: END SMALL TALK
#EndSmallTalk brings the film audience together for a chance to participate in group discussions with curated conversations about the environment of waste as heartbreakingly felt through the film, WELCOME TO SODOM.
7.00pm: FILM SCREENING
WASTED! THE STORY OF FOOD WASTE (Anna Chai and Nari Kye)
2017, 90 mins
WASTED exposes the criminality of food waste and how it’s directly contributing to climate change and shows us how each of us can make small changes all of them delicious to solve one of the greatest problems of the 21st Century. Preceded by a short film FOOD WASTE COOK BOOK (Winnow Solutions).
8.45 PM: IT STILL TASTES DELICIOUS: DINING WITH LESS WASTE
Manarat Al Saadiyaat Chef Lorenzo Pagliaro of L’Arte prepares a delicious free meal that we can all learn from and also enjoy.
Location: L’Arte Restaurant
9.30pm: FILM SCREENING
WALDEN (Daniel Zimmerman)
2018, 106 mins | No dialogue
Comprised entirely of thirteen 360° panning shots, WALDEN is a meditative and hypnotizing look at the journey of a tree in our globalised times.
Saturday, February 8
11.00am: OLD IS GOLD - PRESENTED BY EMIRATES NATURE - WWF
Ever heard of upcycling? It’s when you take something normally considered to be waste and transform it into something more useful and beautiful. It’s a great way to reduce waste and harness your creativity.
Location: Manarat Al Saadiyat Art Studio
1.00pm: GREENER SCREEN: SHOOT SUSTAINABLY
Bassam Alasad and his team will reveal the high carbon footprint of filmmaking. Greener Screen team will give a two hour workshop that connects carbon literacy and environmental consciousness to filmmaking production and ethics.
Location: Manarat Al Saadiyat Theatre
3:30PM FILM SCREENING
LE CHANT DU STYRENE (Alain Resnais)
1959 | 19 mins | French with English subtitles
Classic French film by the well-known auteur gives audiences a historical and lyrical look at plastic. Discussion after the Film with Environmental Activist, Rasha Saleh
STORY OF PLASTIC (Deia Schlosberg)
2019 | 85 mins | English with Arabic Subtitles
A passionate but clear-eyed documentary that uncovers the ugly truth behind the current global plastic pollution crisis. Story of Plastic reveals the disastrous consequences of the flood of plastic smothering ecosystems and poisoning our communities.
7.00pm: FILM SCREENING
ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH (Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky)
2018 | 87 min
A cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive re-engineering of the planet. Four years in the making, the film’s makers traveled to 20 countries to document the impact humans have had on the globe.
