The environment finds a new friend in film: Film festival makes environmental issues everyone's concern

Nabil Shenouda
Contributor
I was pleasantly surprised to find that, in between the occasional gypsy on stage, there were more average Joes than I thought there would be at this year’s Planet In Focus, an environmental film festival. It seems like a lot of us are interested in being informed about the environment.
The festival featured short and full-length films, some fiction and some documentary, and ran between Oct. 13 and 17.
I saw three main features at the festival: Bag It – Is Your Life Too Plastic?, which looks at plastics and their consequences; Dive! Living Off America’s Waste, a documentary about wasted food; and We Live by the River, which documents the cleaning of the Yukon watershed.
Bag It is a Michael Moore-style documentary, except for the fact that the narrator and protagonist, Jeb Berrier, is unable to ridicule any of the antagonists on camera. Still, this light satirical method makes it easy to absorb the film’s lessons.
Bag It begins as a documentary strictly about plastic bags, but eventually evolves into an attack on plastics in general. Berrier’s major target is the American Chemistry Council, which the film blames for hindering the passing of legislation that would slow the production of “single-use disposables.” Keeping the complicated scientific jargon at bay and maintaining a simple tone, Bag It ends with a list of basic things average people can do to prevent plastic from polluting the earth and damaging our own health.
The director and narrator of Dive!, Jeremy Seifert, is a dumpster diver. Yes, he drives around late at night finding unlocked grocery store dumpsters and recovers discarded food close to expiring.
The film follows Seifert as he violates one of the major rules of dumpster diving – never take more than you need – and goes on a mission to find food banks around the city so he can donate the extra food. Over the course of the documentary, these organizations offer to transport the discarded food themselves instead of having divers like Seifert trespass after stores have closed.
This solution to the problem of wasted food was disappointing, as it simply expands on an idea already employed by several stores and food banks; however, Dive! does close with a strong question: how could there be so many people starving when so much food is wasted in production, transportation and consumption?
Each main feature was preceded by one or two short films addressing issues such as plastic bags, population, pollution and waste management. Most of these are artistic depictions of the issues more striking than the feature-length documentaries. Feel What They Feel presents us with a man who is literally bombarded with plastic bags everywhere he goes, even one which emerges from his mouth as he’s eating. Bottom of the River, another stand-out piece, is a symphony of garbage bags sitting at the bottom of a river as waste is dumped as into it.
The culminating principle of the festival is that the problems with the environment and their solutions rest with us. In We Live by the River, the first step for communities involved in cleaning the Yukon watershed is to learn how to love and respect each other.
This film most convincingly proves that the solution to the watershed’s problems lies in cooperation and the understanding that how we treat the earth is a reflection of how we treat each other.
I went to Planet In Focus with the same attitude as a lot of other average Torontonians: we can do something to make a difference, but we feel overwhelmed by the size and scope of the issues. I learned the issues really are staggering, but I also learned that we can do something about them. It really may not be too late.